henning@acsu.buffalo.edu (Karl syllogistic Henning) (03/25/91)
Barbara Vaughan writes: >Every human society that ever developed had some kind of religion. Obviously >more people thought of it independently than thought of calculus. When you say this, you use "religion" to cover a great variety of belief-systems, whereas calculus is much more specific. This corrupts your comparison, I fear. While it is a safe generalization that all human societies have developed belief-systems to explain Things/Life/the World beyond those life-skills of which they would have been able to achieve a more or less scientific (to use "science" in a broad sense of applied knowledge through repeated attempt) understanding (fishing, hunting, agriculture, shelter, medicine, e.g.), it is misleading to suggest that all such belief-systems consitute religions, or imply that they share many "advanced functionalities" of religion (salvation[TM], e.g.). This would become apparent, if you were to attempt to offer even a rudimentary definition of "religion" which could fit your statement above. Not all "religions" (if we must use it as a blanket term) function in a uniform manner, in terms either of people relating to a perceived deity/pantheon, or the universal problem of regulating social interaction. There are certainly "families", or clumps of similar religions, though. Thus, much closer parallels could be drawn between, say, Xianity and Islam, than between Xianity and Buddhism, or Islam and the Tao, or either Buddhism or the Tao and Shinto. Indeed it is a fundamental conceptual abuse of the Tao, or Shinto, or Confucianism, to force them upon the Procrustean bed of religion, in the sense of Xianity or Islam. Yet they are certainly belief- systems in some sense. Xians tend to be too precious of their perceived "uniqueness" among religions, to accept the fact that theirs bears any kinship to any other religion, unless it be a qualified relation to Judaism (the "old law" allegedly superseded by jesus) or Islam (the most successful -- in terms at least of numbers of adherents -- of the "heretical" spinoffs of xianity). kph -- Doris: But without God, the universe is meaningless. Life is meaningless. We're meaningless. (/Deadly pause/) I have a sudden and overpowering urge to get laid. -- Woody Allen, "God (A Play)"