Korean Job Discussion Forums

[banjois]

Man, between you, my friend today, and Olivencia, my viewpoint's starting to waver...

My hang-up is some kind of aesthetic appreciation of religious thought. There's a great quote from Brideshead Revisited about it:

[Fox]

I can emphathize with you, because I have feelings about Judaism that sound very similar to your feelings about Christianity. But, we as a people can have all the beauty of religion without believing in it. I find lots of beauty and interest in various mythologies from around the world, even though I don't believe in any of them. Religion shouldn't be erased from our history, and we can still read about it, enjoy it, and like any other fictional work, use it to convey ideas. It's only when people start taking it as the truth that trouble begins.

We can think lovely ideas without genuinely believing them. We can even partake in religion in some sort of Feueurbachian sense, where we admit our "God" is just an imaginary figure upon which we project our aspirations to give us something to strive towards. What we should not do, though, is treat religion as a normative force in the world. "We should do something because (religion X, God Y, or prophet Z) says so," leads to trouble.

[banjois]

It's weird, in conversations with people with no personal experience of religion, I find myself being an apologist for religion a LOT. Then I get into a conversation with somebody religious and start feeling all icky.

I guess I can agree that religion isn't really a force for good in the world, although it certainly has been in the past (I save my conversation for how Christianity advanced women's rights for when I really want to argue with someone, although obviously it hasn't in quite a long time). I'm just wary of a lot of non-religious people's utter dismissal of anything with the least whiff of holiness on it. So much of what I love is lost from that viewpoint: Perotin, most of Bill Monroe's oeuvre, the little bead about an inch across in the Cloisters that has a crucifixion scene with about 50 people carved into it, and so on.

I also get weary of a lot of dogmatic atheists. It seems to me that their thought is predicated on as much blind faith as an Evangelical's. It seems to me that to assert that there is no god is as problematic as insisting that there is one and he wants us to act one way or another...

[banjois]

This thread is rapidly slipping into anti-TOS land. Too bad.

[bacasper]

[Fox]

[Sergio Stefanuto]

[runthegauntlet]

[banjois]

True, all of that. I'd argue that there were a lot of progressive (given the time and place) things in the New Testament. Even the Pauline dictum "Husbands love your wives" is pretty removed from the chattel status of wives at the time.

Don't get me wrong, the church has done a lot of things to hold back women's rights too. But I think a lot of liberal modern thought could trace its roots back to Christian doctrine.

And, like I said, this is something I usually bring up just to provoke an interesting conversation. I often present points I don't wholly support. Too much Plato during my undergrad, maybe.

[runthegauntlet]

[bacasper]

[djsmnc]

[runthegauntlet]

[djsmnc]

[runthegauntlet]