[ExI] Tolerance

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Fri Dec 11 12:15:17 UTC 2009


2009/12/10 Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>

> One huge problem with this rather disjointed thread is the confusion
> between "religion" and "belief in a god or gods". An atheist, just from the
> derivation of the word, is a person who has no belief in deity. But of
> course there are many godless religions. Animist religions seem to have no
> gods, per se, but see the world as suffused with and shaped by personified
> forces and passions. The Australian aboriginal Dreaming is a vast ancient
> integral cosmology in which the seasonal landscape and its inhabitants are
> representations of volitional Ancestors; there's nothing remotely like an
> Abrahamic God--but it would seem absurd not to call this all-encompassing
> worldview "religious."
>

Yes, this is fundamental point. And I suspect that even our understanding of
pre-christian or non-European gods are nowadays strongly influenced by
monotheistic views (including for some of their followers).

For instance, ancient Greeks used not to see any especially dramatic
contradictions in the fact that very different and incompatible versions of
the same myth were widespread. Chronology thereof was also quite vague.

It has been persuasively contended that this shows that they did not
consider statements concerning everyday life ("there is a stone in this
basket") on the same basis as statements concerning mythical facts ("Pallas
Athena was wounded during the Troy siege").

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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