RE: Hindu hell
January 29, 2019 at 5:58 pm
(This post was last modified: January 29, 2019 at 6:28 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
I'm positively certain that I misspelled plenty of the names, lol.
People did, indeed, create hierachies for the various gods that made their way into shinto, and a conceptual ranking of where different types of spirits found themselves, greater and lesser this and thats. I included the rankings of the shrines only because they show how far down the ladder shinto took the idea of a hierarchal structure. Even a place of worship..had a place, relative to other places of worship. This isn't unique to shinto, obviously..some places are more or less holy or sacred.
Hierarchy exists in every religious system - it's not really a stretch to maintain that the proposition of some hierarchy is necessary to bind religious precepts into a cogent whole. All of these ideas, at a bare minimum, seek to describe our place in the universe. That...alone... is an imposition of hierarchy.
It's true, though, that they don't always do it by ranking gods (at least not officially, lol), sometimes they rank spirit animals or places or stations of enlightenment (or groups of people.....like priests). All of which is entirely lulzworthy, but meh.
As far as christianity and a platonic god...I think that you'd probably want to drag Vulcan in on this one to explain to you why a theologian drawing an equals sign does not establish that we're discussing the same thing. The impetus of the particular theologian accounts for that equals sign more than any classification of concept might. If a person believes that some portion of the platonic god concept is credible, or there is a tangible benefit to attaching plato to their god concepts...that's what they're going to do.
The christian god is platos demiurge, a subordinate figure. His form of the good was impersonal, the christian god is personal. I could rattle off the rest of a list of dissimilarities, but I assume you'll be able to find them yourself.
People did, indeed, create hierachies for the various gods that made their way into shinto, and a conceptual ranking of where different types of spirits found themselves, greater and lesser this and thats. I included the rankings of the shrines only because they show how far down the ladder shinto took the idea of a hierarchal structure. Even a place of worship..had a place, relative to other places of worship. This isn't unique to shinto, obviously..some places are more or less holy or sacred.
Hierarchy exists in every religious system - it's not really a stretch to maintain that the proposition of some hierarchy is necessary to bind religious precepts into a cogent whole. All of these ideas, at a bare minimum, seek to describe our place in the universe. That...alone... is an imposition of hierarchy.
It's true, though, that they don't always do it by ranking gods (at least not officially, lol), sometimes they rank spirit animals or places or stations of enlightenment (or groups of people.....like priests). All of which is entirely lulzworthy, but meh.
As far as christianity and a platonic god...I think that you'd probably want to drag Vulcan in on this one to explain to you why a theologian drawing an equals sign does not establish that we're discussing the same thing. The impetus of the particular theologian accounts for that equals sign more than any classification of concept might. If a person believes that some portion of the platonic god concept is credible, or there is a tangible benefit to attaching plato to their god concepts...that's what they're going to do.
The christian god is platos demiurge, a subordinate figure. His form of the good was impersonal, the christian god is personal. I could rattle off the rest of a list of dissimilarities, but I assume you'll be able to find them yourself.
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