RE: Is Allegorical Religion better than Fundamentalism?
April 1, 2022 at 11:43 pm
(This post was last modified: April 2, 2022 at 12:28 am by Belacqua.)
(April 1, 2022 at 11:17 pm)Angrboda Wrote: Well, satori aside, it's like the scene from the Incredibles which I posted in response to Neo where Syndrome says, "When everyone is super.... no one will be." Religion seems to require the sacred. Sacred literally means set apart.
The separateness of the sacred has to do with the way people value and treat things. If a culture holds motherhood, for example, to be sacred, then it's sacred. I agree that religion often calls things sacred. But a sacred space or tree or ceremony, for example, need not be extra-mundane.
Sacred: "connected with God or a god or dedicated to a religious purpose and so deserving veneration." Many things in this world may be connected with God, dedicated to a religious purpose, or deserving of veneration. The fact that something is set apart doesn't mean it's ontologically from a different world. A sacred tree is a tree, not a god. A sacred tradition is a tradition, not a god.
Sacred spaces are "set apart" because they are separate from the rest of the city. The courtyard in front of a Roman temple is a sacred place called a fanum. It is connected to the god, but it is not the god. It's a courtyard. Its separateness means that there are certain things you have to take care of before you enter the fanum -- pro-fane things. Its disconnection from the rest of the city means that people who are especially enthusiastic for the god spend a lot of time there -- fanatics. These people are connected to the god (or hope to be) but are not themselves gods.
As I've said a few times now, there are several religious traditions which hold that the divine and the mundane are not separate. The divine may be less visible to us, due to our habits of mind, but that doesn't mean it's far away. But I think I've said this enough times now, so I'll let it drop.
