Best books on religion?

[EgoDeath]

Whether they're scathingly critical, apologetic or purely informative, what are the best books you've read about different religions?

My choice would have to be The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. It's about Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness and a number of other Buddhist concepts.

I'd like to hear about some books on Christianity, Islam or Judaism if you guys have any suggestions.

Furthermore, why did you read these books? Was it to gain a better understanding of those respective religions or was it purely to find more holes to poke in their story?

Let me know.

[Darwin1245]

As a psychology enthusiast, I prefer reading books about religions that existed before the currently existing religions, and about religions that tribes in the Far East and other remote areas follow. I read Joseph Campbell's books. They are kind of informative, as the author describes religions and beliefs of primitive people in primitive tribes that still exist, and beliefs that existed in the past.

The very basic ideas of the beliefs that existed in the past are almost the same as the ones in the the most common religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. I am trying to find out why humans tend to make up and believe in those now-considered irrational beliefs using some psychological concepts that I know.

It supports that religions are human-made. It helps me a lot to find out the truth about religions.

If you are interested in this particular issue, I recommend Joseph Campbell's Primitive Mythology.

[Fake Messiah]

[EgoDeath]

As a psychology enthusiast, I prefer reading books about religions that existed before the currently existing religions, and about religions that tribes in the Far East and other remote areas follow. I read Joseph Campbell's books. They are kind of informative, as the author describes religions and beliefs of primitive people in primitive tribes that still exist, and beliefs that existed in the past.

The very basic ideas of the beliefs that existed in the past are almost the same as the ones in the the most common religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. I am trying to find out why humans tend to make up and believe in those now-considered irrational beliefs using some psychological concepts that I know.

It supports that religions are human-made. It helps me a lot to find out the truth about religions.

If you are interested in this particular issue, I recommend Joseph Campbell's Primitive Mythology.

Interesting stuff; I'll definitely look into Campbell. What's interesting is that the common thread between all of these religions is that they all seem to search for a way to explain the world around us. It's no wonder that, in 2019, no peoples with access to information and the scientific method come up with any of these religious ideas. You don't see people seriously purporting new ideas about a new god or gods in 2019... At least not without some sort of financial motivation or serious sarcasm/parody involved, e.g. the 'Flying Spaghetti Monster.'

@Fake Messiah

Of course, the most informative of all informational books! The Holy Bible!

[Darwin1245]

What's interesting is that the common thread between all of these religions is that they all seem to search for a way to explain the world around us.

Yes! That was exactly what I thought when I first contemplated why would people come up with religions. People were not retarded; they were just trying to figure out laws, just as scientists today are trying to figure out physical and chemical laws. It is likely the same thing. People back then did not have enough knowledge, so they came up with the easiest-of-all explanation: a living being (a god) "sends" rain to a tribe or a group of people living in a defined area when they do "good" things that please that god enough to reward them. Oh! And when those rituals did not work, they attributed it to god's "mood." Why not? Isn't he presumably a human-like being? How hilarious!!

To be honest, it seems kind of rational if you do not have knowledge about how rain drops form. They probably knew that clouds precede rain, but could not expect when clouds form, and there are times when clouds can be seen, but disappear without rain in a few hours or days. When anything is not understandable or behaves unexpectedly, we always consider the possibility that it is controlled or caused to behave that way by a living being, because living beings' behaviors are not completely predicted as opposed to, for example, a rock's behavior. Some natural phenomena are easily understood like gravity--while I am not sure if there are any religions that believed/believe that gravity is somehow caused be a god, but even if they did/do exist, they probably were/are not many. When anything is unsupported (provided that there are no upward forces,) it falls. It is just simple--well it seems simple in that sense--unlike weather, earthquakes and storms, which people thought that a living being must be controlling them somehow, and they associated some behaviors (non-sense rituals) they did when rain suddenly fell with rain, and that's probably how the non-sense rituals originated. You can also notice that what people think please a god are just the same things that please any other human being except for the non-sense rituals.

Today, we don't need religions anymore because we could find out that there are laws that control these phenomena, and that's why educated people are more likely to become atheists. If only people understood "holy" books literally, we would get rid of religions very soon. I think that one of the main reasons that religions will remain for years before their followers realize that they were and are just wasting their time praying and reading primitive-sense books is because some religions' texts are understood metaphorically. Understanding a text metaphorically means that the meaning would change to whatever they want it to be just to seem consistent with today's cultures. I think that Islam is the worst of them all because its book actually is written in a poem-like style; it contains many metaphors.

[Belacqua]

Today, we don't need religions anymore because we could find out that there are laws that control these phenomena, and that's why educated people are more likely to become atheists.

I'm sure you're right that in the past, at least some religious ideas were explanations for the natural world. These have certainly been superseded by science. 
Are you sure this is or has been the primary goal of religions? For example, science can help us determine the means toward a moral goal, but can't determine what that goal is. The old is/ought thing. 

If only people understood "holy" books literally, we would get rid of religions very soon. 

Maybe so... But are you sure that those books were ever meant to be read literally? I mean, some parts are clearly poetic. They were written poetically, as puzzles or challenges. Ancient people didn't have our science, but they weren't stupid. In fact, they were probably more comfortable than we are with myth and other non-literal expression. 

I think that one of the main reasons that religions will remain for years before their followers realize that they were and are just wasting their time praying and reading primitive-sense books is because some religions' texts are understood metaphorically. Understanding a text metaphorically means that the meaning would change to whatever they want it to be just to seem consistent with today's cultures. 

This seems to me to be begging the question. First, it assumes that they are all wasting their time by reading "primitive-sense" books. How do we demonstrate that a modern person's reading of, say, Ezekiel's vision of the Merkabah, is a waste of time for that person? 

And you seem to think that understanding a text metaphorically, so that the meaning can change, is necessarily a bad thing. Again, begging the question that every text is supposed to have one and only one science-compatible meaning, and that if the meaning is not finally knowable it's a waste of time. 

One of the great things about "primitive-sense" books is exactly that they have been around a long time and the interpretations have changed. At the moment, the Book of Job is not only the Book of Job. It is impossible for us to read it in the way that its earliest readers did. For you and me, the Book of Job is the text of the Book of Job plus all the myriad interpretations that have been made of it over the millennia. It almost doesn't matter what the original author[s] meant to say. It's more important, and infinitely fascinating, to read the story through the eyes of its greatest interpreters, like, e.g. William Blake. 

Or, if you don't like the Bible, there are the Greek myths. Whatever Homer meant originally in the Odyssey, for us the meaning is infinitely enriched by the later Neoplatonic readings, the many operas, adaptations, and responses that we have available. 

For my list of important books, nothing surprising:

Plato; Symposium
Augustine; Confessions
Dante;  Divine Comedy
Blake;  Jerusalem
Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy
Buber; I and Thou

and commentary about religion, not religion itself: 

C.S. Lewis; The Discarded Image (Lewis is great as a medieval scholar, not great as a preacher)
Lovejoy; The Great Chain of Being

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Two suggestions:

The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman.  A really interesting take on the origins of Christianity.  A work of fiction, it posits Jesus Christ as two brothers - 'Jesus', a legitimate 'holy' man, and Christ, a dour, cynical manipulator who uses his brother's teachings to found a powerful church.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Almost a play-by-play of the desperation of Christian apologetics.

Boru

[onlinebiker]

Mad Magazine.

All religions should be viewed for what they are - tall stories better suited for comic books than attempts at scholarly effort.

[Belacqua]

Understanding a text metaphorically means that the meaning would change to whatever they want it to be just to seem consistent with today's cultures.

It occurred to me that in casual conversation we might imply that there are only two ways to read a text: literal and metaphorical. 

I'm sure everybody knows what that means, and I don't intend to argue with you here. It might explicate how people use holy books better, though, if we open those terms out a bit. 

As everyone knows, a metaphor is a specific kind of trope. X is Y. "Love is a Rose." Offhand I can't think of many metaphors in the Bible. Certainly the Song of Solomon is full of them, where he says his lover's eyes are jewels, and stuff like that. But I'm not able to recall any elsewhere. (No doubt others can think of some.) 

This doesn't mean that much in the Bible is intended literally. Here is a list of tropes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_speech#Tropes

And to save you a trip, here are just the ones starting with A:

accismus: expressing the want of something by denying it[15]
allegory: A metaphoric narrative in which the literal elements indirectly reveal a parallel story of symbolic or abstract significance.[16][17][18]
allusion: Covert reference to another work of literature or art
ambiguity: Phrasing which can have two meanings
anacoenosis: Posing a question to an audience, often with the implication that it shares a common interest with the speaker
analogy: A comparison
anapodoton: Leaving a common known saying unfinished
antanaclasis: A form of pun in which a word is repeated in two different senses.[19]
anthimeria: A substitution of one part of speech for another, such as noun for a verb and vice versa.[20]
anthropomorphism: Ascribing human characteristics to something that is not human, such as an animal or a god (see zoomorphism)
antimetabole: Repetition of words in successive clauses, but in switched order
antiphrasis: A name or a phrase used ironically.
antistasis: Repetition of a word in a different sense.
antonomasia: Substitution of a proper name for a phrase or vice versa
aphorism: Briefly phrased, easily memorable statement of a truth or opinion, an adage
apologia: Justifying one's actions
aporia: Faked or sincere puzzled questioning
apophasis: (Invoking) an idea by denying its (invocation)
appositive: Insertion of a parenthetical entry
apostrophe: Directing the attention away from the audience to an absent third party, often in the form of a personified abstraction or inanimate object.
archaism: Use of an obsolete, archaic word (a word used in olden language, e.g. Shakespeare's language)
auxesis: Form of hyperbole, in which a more important-sounding word is used in place of a more descriptive term

No doubt the fact that they're all named with Greek words shows their origins. Greek orators, sophists, etc., studied the use of these. For a very long time, students of the Liberal Arts began with grammar (the background you need to read texts), logic (the tools you need to construct a reasonable text), and rhetoric (the tools you need to make a persuasive text). So they also learned to identify and use these tropes. 

This is important because the authors of the Bible knew them. And the early readers of the Bible knew them. They were comfortable with a hundred kinds of non-literal expression, more than we are now. It was not a question of either telling the truth like a journalist or making shit up. It was standard in the olden days to write non-literally. And intelligent readers of holy texts, then and now, have to know this.

[Darwin1245]

Today, we don't need religions anymore because we could find out that there are laws that control these phenomena, and that's why educated people are more likely to become atheists.

I'm sure you're right that in the past, at least some religious ideas were explanations for the natural world. These have certainly been superseded by science. 
Are you sure this is or has been the primary goal of religions? [1] For example, science can help us determine the means toward a moral goal, but can't determine what that goal is. The old is/ought thing. 

If only people understood "holy" books literally, we would get rid of religions very soon. 

[2] Maybe so... But are you sure that those books were ever meant to be read literally? I mean, some parts are clearly poetic. They were written poetically, as puzzles or challenges. [3] Ancient people didn't have our science, but they weren't stupid. In fact, they were probably more comfortable than we are with myth and other non-literal expression. 

I think that one of the main reasons that religions will remain for years before their followers realize that they were and are just wasting their time praying and reading primitive-sense books is because some religions' texts are understood metaphorically. Understanding a text metaphorically means that the meaning would change to whatever they want it to be just to seem consistent with today's cultures. 

[4] This seems to me to be begging the question. First, it assumes that they are all wasting their time by reading "primitive-sense" books. How do we demonstrate that a modern person's reading of, say, Ezekiel's vision of the Merkabah, is a waste of time for that person? 

[5] And you seem to think that understanding a text metaphorically, so that the meaning can change, is necessarily a bad thing. Again, begging the question that every text is supposed to have one and only one science-compatible meaning, and that if the meaning is not finally knowable it's a waste of time. 

[6] One of the great things about "primitive-sense" books is exactly that they have been around a long time and the interpretations have changed. At the moment, the Book of Job is not only the Book of Job. It is impossible for us to read it in the way that its earliest readers did. For you and me, the Book of Job is the text of the Book of Job plus all the myriad interpretations that have been made of it over the millennia. It almost doesn't matter what the original author[s] meant to say. It's more important, and infinitely fascinating, to read the story through the eyes of its greatest interpreters, like, e.g. William Blake. 

Or, if you don't like the Bible, there are the Greek myths. Whatever Homer meant originally in the Odyssey, for us the meaning is infinitely enriched by the later Neoplatonic readings, the many operas, adaptations, and responses that we have available. 

For my list of important books, nothing surprising:

Plato; Symposium
Augustine; Confessions
Dante;  Divine Comedy
Blake;  Jerusalem
Nietzsche; The Birth of Tragedy
Buber; I and Thou

and commentary about religion, not religion itself: 

C.S. Lewis; The Discarded Image (Lewis is great as a medieval scholar, not great as a preacher)
Lovejoy; The Great Chain of Being

[1] Morals could be taken from any other book as long as its author is a human being that is normal, which necessarily means that he/she thinks and behaves the same way as most people in his/her group do. We don't need a holy book to tell us what we ought to do. Atheists have morals, albeit they don't believe in religions. We follow rules and laws that make sense to us. If the morals taught by religions were not relevant or did not make sense to us, religions wouldn't have survived. An intriguing question is: do they actually make sense to us in the 21st century? The least common religions are probably the earlier ones. Even some the most common ones' morals and teachings are not acceptable by religious people. Like terrorism? 
There is no single reason for why religions were made up; there might have been many other reasons along with the one I mentioned. It is almost impossible to know for sure. I agree that if/when most people disbelieve in religions, there would probably be a moral issue because there would be no standard, and because being moral would not be as rewarding as thought of heaven. It can be compensated for by having a book that teaches children morals. And people would follow it to avoid punishment by law or to avoid making a child cry. 
Science can determine what morals should be. I would've written an example of how science can do that, but did not want to make this post lengthier and more irrelevant to the topic of this Thread is already is. Here is a hint: when anxiety is called anxiety disorder, and when it is not? 

[2] Whether a book is meant to be read literally or metaphorically is up to each one's author. Yes, puzzles are fun, but non-literal meanings can be understood in different ways, especially when some readers interpret them with no respect to the context. I like poems, and I respect the ancient literature, but romantic poems, when understood in different ways by different groups of people, would likely not cause wars. I have to say that the metaphors are most evident is Islamic texts, and understanding texts that way results in wars and murders. You probably are/were a Christian. I was a Muslim, and I still live with a religious family and meet many Muslims, and that's what I noticed when they interpret texts. They, not only interpret metaphorically, but interpret individual sentences in completely different contexts other than the one intended in the text. This way, they "discover" things like the theory of relativity in Quran. I have not read the Bible yet, so I can't say whether this applies to the Bible or not. 

[3] I did not say that ancient people were stupid. The right word would be "ignorant," "relatively ignorant," because they were not knowledgeable as we are now. I agree that they probably must have been more comfortable with myths, and that's probably because they couldn't explain phenomena in other ways. They were just trying, and, as someone who is always trying to understand almost everything around me, I respect that however ridiculous myths seem to be.
The problem is that holy books are not edited or changed in any way; they do not evolve as science does—in some religions more than others. Religion was probably the same thing as science when religions suddenly and somehow originated within a group of people. 

[4] Some morals in holy books are not useless, but morals would be better filtered out and put in other books of morals. Probably, they already do that by making books for children that contain the morals written in the Bible, for example. I believe that holy books are human-made, and I am a human myself, so, I have to admit that I find some of the meanings helpful for me and other people, because the author is not an alien that has a different brain wiring than mine. I apologize for not having made this clear in my previous post. 

[5] I did not say that "understanding a text metaphorically, so that the meaning can change, is necessarily a bad thing," or that "every text is supposed to have one and only one science-compatible meaning, and that if the meaning is not finally knowable it's a waste of time." Not every non-literal text is a waste of time. I prefer Classical music with no vocals over any other kind of music. A piece of music of that kind is not understood by everyone the same way, but I still like Classical music. I am not against non-literal texts. They are fun to read when it comes to poems or literature in general. Perhaps metaphors are not that unclear as the ones in Islamic texts. When books are understood as in [2,] it is not right. 

[6] As I already wrote in [4,] they are not completely useless.

---

Understanding a text metaphorically means that the meaning would change to whatever they want it to be just to seem consistent with today's cultures.

It occurred to me that in casual conversation we might imply that there are only two ways to read a text: literal and metaphorical. 

I'm sure everybody knows what that means, and I don't intend to argue with you here. It might explicate how people use holy books better, though, if we open those terms out a bit. 

As everyone knows, a metaphor is a specific kind of trope. X is Y. "Love is a Rose." Offhand I can't think of many metaphors in the Bible. Certainly the Song of Solomon is full of them, where he says his lover's eyes are jewels, and stuff like that. But I'm not able to recall any elsewhere. (No doubt others can think of some.) 

This doesn't mean that much in the Bible is intended literally. Here is a list of tropes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_speech#Tropes

And to save you a trip, here are just the ones starting with A:

accismus: expressing the want of something by denying it[15]
allegory: A metaphoric narrative in which the literal elements indirectly reveal a parallel story of symbolic or abstract significance.[16][17][18]
allusion: Covert reference to another work of literature or art
ambiguity: Phrasing which can have two meanings
anacoenosis: Posing a question to an audience, often with the implication that it shares a common interest with the speaker
analogy: A comparison
anapodoton: Leaving a common known saying unfinished
antanaclasis: A form of pun in which a word is repeated in two different senses.[19]
anthimeria: A substitution of one part of speech for another, such as noun for a verb and vice versa.[20]
anthropomorphism: Ascribing human characteristics to something that is not human, such as an animal or a god (see zoomorphism)
antimetabole: Repetition of words in successive clauses, but in switched order
antiphrasis: A name or a phrase used ironically.
antistasis: Repetition of a word in a different sense.
antonomasia: Substitution of a proper name for a phrase or vice versa
aphorism: Briefly phrased, easily memorable statement of a truth or opinion, an adage
apologia: Justifying one's actions
aporia: Faked or sincere puzzled questioning
apophasis: (Invoking) an idea by denying its (invocation)
appositive: Insertion of a parenthetical entry
apostrophe: Directing the attention away from the audience to an absent third party, often in the form of a personified abstraction or inanimate object.
archaism: Use of an obsolete, archaic word (a word used in olden language, e.g. Shakespeare's language)
auxesis: Form of hyperbole, in which a more important-sounding word is used in place of a more descriptive term

No doubt the fact that they're all named with Greek words shows their origins. Greek orators, sophists, etc., studied the use of these. For a very long time, students of the Liberal Arts began with grammar (the background you need to read texts), logic (the tools you need to construct a reasonable text), and rhetoric (the tools you need to make a persuasive text). So they also learned to identify and use these tropes. 

This is important because the authors of the Bible knew them. And the early readers of the Bible knew them. They were comfortable with a hundred kinds of non-literal expression, more than we are now. It was not a question of either telling the truth like a journalist or making shit up. It was standard in the olden days to write non-literally. And intelligent readers of holy texts, then and now, have to know this.

I agree with that. It was probably a standard for them. When metaphors are understood the same way by everyone, and in the same way as intended by the author/s whoever they were, it would, actually, be acceptable to some extent in holy books. Metaphors make texts interesting and fun to read. I already explained when I am against the metaphoric way of interpreting holy texts in my previous reply. 

If you have anything else to say, please, PM me, or create a thread specifically to continue discussing this because this is hardly related to the original topic and purpose of this Thread. I won't reply otherwise.