this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Religious Cringe
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This is the official Lemmy for the r/ReligiousCringe***** subreddit. This is a community about poking fun at the religious fundamentalist's who take their religion a little bit too far. Here you will find religious content that is so outrageous and so cringeworthy that even someone who is mildly religious will cringe.
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We wouldn't call a quark a quark but we'd still know that quarks exist and what they are. My point is aside from some simple ideas that are simply too basic to not think of, religions would still be fundamentally different.
You're underestimating the similarity of religions and overestimating the similarity of scientific paradigms
Perhaps i'm putting religion through a higher scrutiny here, but that's because we're comparing two things with a very different level for complexity here.
The idea that there's some invisible force that makes things you don't understand happen, or that we should love and respect eachother, or even more specific ones like "we shouldn't eat so and so food" or "we should dress in x or y way" are still simple enough that anyone could come up with at any point in their lives with little effort. All that remains is a game of chance of how similar the combination of these ideas is to the religions we had previously.
With science, it gets much more complex, each field of science, or even each concept within that field, required way more effort to learn, and goes much more indepth than anything religion can provide.
So while i'd consider humanity rediscovering even basic arithmetic to be most certainly more than just chance, forgive me for thinking people eventually coming up with a religion that uses a cross as a symbol isn't enough to say that that is christianity reborn.
Crosses are boring. Let's talk about the Yin Yang instead. It's a symbol that illustrates the oneness of opposing forces in the universe, which is the whole point of Taoism. George Lucas even used it when he copied Taoism to make the Jedi religion, and said the force has a light side and a dark side. However, Lucas changed the myth and said the light side is natural and good, while the dark side is unnatural and bad. This is just my opinion, but I think he was influenced by christianity into making this change. Interestingly, this idea of the dark side being bad seems to be a postchristian invention, as in Judaism the Devil is actually one of Elohim's employees. He's the literal devil's advocate, whose job is to question the lord. So Judaism actually has more in common with Taoism than with Christianity on the light/dark side of things. The Lucifer myth, of a divine being turned evil by abandoning their purpose, is very interesting. I get kind of a Greek vibe from it, you know, like Kronos? Prometheus? The Greeks believed there was a natural order to the world, the Fates, and that humans and gods alike could choose to defy fate, though they would inevitably be punished. That's why Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill, he tried to lock up Thanatos and cheat death. So the Kronos myth, the Prometheus myth, and the Sisyphus myth are actually all the same story. Guy gets too big for his britches, tries to cheat fate, and is punished. It's the same myth told three times over within the same culture. I think Roman adoption of Christianity introduced Greek elements into Christianity and that's why we have the Lucifer myth, which is the same myth again as those three. But interestingly, Judaism does have the same myth in a pre-roman context, because Cain, of course! So the traitor myth that was introduced to Christianity by the Romans from Greece was actually part of the Hebrew religion all along, just in a less prominent position. And I'm certain there are other traitor myths in just about every culture in the world. For example, aboriginal australians tell the myth of Willie Wagtail, who was turned into a bird for gossiping too much, and the story fits the same structure if I recall correctly. The traitor myth is universal to human culture.
That's all very interesting, but i'm not sure what you're trying to get at. I've already agreed that certain ideas are simple enough that they're very likely to be thought of again, but is that enough to say that "so and so religion has re-appeared"? How close to their original counterparts do they have to be for you to consider them to be essentially the same?
Because i'm fairly certain that save for minor discrepancies in areas that are more subjective, every field of science could re-emerge and get to the same state it's in now simply by studying the world around us. And i don't think the same can be said of religion. Do you genuinely believe that near perfect counterparts for all current religions would be formed again? Or at least to the same level that science could?
The Romans believed that all religions were already near perfect counterparts. They maintained that there is only one pantheon of gods, and the pantheons of different cultures are just different names and interpretations of the same gods. The Romans used it as a tool of conquest. After they conquered a nation, they told the natives that they all worship the same gods, and put a lot of effort into making sure everyone identified as being part of the same religion. It's easier to revolt against an oppressor who is a different religion and ethnicity than you. Human beings have a harder time organising resistance against a group they culturally identify with.
Some Roman scholars had limited contact with Vikings, and they determined that Odin is the Norse counterpart of Hermes. That's the point where syncretism starts to get a bit silly, because while they are both gods of travellers, the scholars completely ignored the hierarchy of the Norse gods. They ignored that Odin is the skyfather. Perhaps that's why our modern culture is so fascinated by Thor as the most popular Norse god. As a thunder god, Thor syncretises to Jupiter/Zeus, the king of the gods. Syncretism actually continued into the Christian age, and some believed that the Norse counterpart of Jesus is Loki. It's fascinating. You see, while Loki was a trickster, his other two big functions in the Norse pantheon were the scapegoat and the bringer of Ragnarok. When the Aesir promised to pay a dwarf to build a wall and didn't want to pay up, they went to Loki for help. Loki seduced the dwarf's donkey to slow down the work, and that's how we got Sleipnir. Loki was at times the savoir of the Aesir. And as for Ragnarok, the Christian monks who talked to the Vikings saw Ragnarok as a Norse name for the rapture. So they assumed Loki was Jesus.
Now, if you tried syncretising Christianity to the Greek pantheon, Jesus would come out equivalent to Dionysus. There's the wine miracles, there's the hanging out with prostitutes, and there's the being an ally to slaves and the oppressed. Slaves were allowed to join the Cult of Dionysus, which is really cool. And of course, if you want to get queer with it (which I always do), then Dionysus being raised as a mortal girl fits in nicely with Jesus not having a Y chromosome because there was no sperm involved in his conception. And I don't even need to tell you how queer Loki is. So it's really neat that Jesus and two of his syncretisms are trans. But there's a lot of other thematic similarities between Jesus and Dionysus like the fact they're both liberators and they're both conquerer-kings. As paradoxical as that is, it's true of both of them.