(August 9, 2021 at 8:41 am)Angrboda Wrote: Religion in general, and scriptural religion specifically, is an attempt to place a breakwater against the forces of change which would undermine what a group of people value. As such, the existence of a written scripture is itself a testament to the fact that things change, and without the anchoring in a supposedly immovable text, those things codified as sacred in the text will eventually disappear.
Even when I was a Christian, I recognized that religions require a book.
If you look at the evolution of life, it requires replication with only small changes. Those small changes may eventually result in something new via natural selection, but without mostly-accurate gene copying, the species cannot reproduce and survive.
A spiritual movement without a holy book is just a short-lived cult. Add in a book, and it becomes a religion.