I personally would go so far as to say that a religion lacking any sort of mythology is really just a philospohy or an ideology, though that could just be me.
Classification of religions
- Thread starter madviking
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North King
blech
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Please clarify.
Ajidica
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The concept of Ghenna didn't emerge in Judaism until after contact with the Persians.LightSpectra said:
No matter how you phrase it, Christianity was in some way influence by Zoroastrianism. It makes sense geographicaly and theologicaly; both were monothiestic religions.
LightSpectra
me autem minui
This is false. Not only are the two conceptions of the "underworld" completely different, but Zoroastrianism didn't even exist until around the 6th century B.C. (much less as any significant religious entity until the Achaemenids), when you can see Jewish references to a place of punishment in the Book of Isaiah, which was a chronicle of the Neo-Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in the same century; a time when the Israelites had no contact with Persia.
In cultural or traditional manners, yes, because that's almost inevitably true. I doubt so theologically because there's no hard evidence to suggest it besides a chronological comparison, which is by definition circumstantial evidence.
Ajidica
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I was under the impression otherwise, but whatever.
Egypt already had a pretty well developed mythology involving ressurection and virgin births. Its hard to deny that Christianity was not in some way inspired from those mythologies.
LightSpectra
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Resurrections and virgin births are things you can find in a great deal of religions. You could trace it all back to Egypt if you wanted every anthropologist on earth to beat you up, or you could explain this by saying that they're both miracles that appeal directly to our nature as human beings and thus stories of them will eventually pop up in most cultures.
Cynovolans
Not in my dimension.
The Egyptians didn't believe in resurrection. Osiris was not the God of Resurrection like too many people believe, he was the God of the Afterlife, the Underworld, and the Dead.
ParkCungHee
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Also, Neo-Confucianism (which is when Confucianism really becomes a religion rather then a system of ethics) expresses a belief in a divine power.
In Neo-Confucianism, rather then being correct by virtue of the self-evident truth of his statements, and the benefits of a society based on them, Confucius is correct by virtue of divining the nature of reality. Dissobedience from his commandments does not simply cause harm in the nature of the act, but causes reality to recoil.
For example, in traditional confucianism, if the son of the monarch is disobedient, this will make the father ashamed/saddened, and set a bad example amongst the subjects, perhaps causing unrest.
In Neo-Confucianism, all of that may happen as well as say...an Earthquake. Because the son has not just violated a system of Ethics, but a system by which the world functions.
Cynovolans
Not in my dimension.
That wasn't really resurrection, because he never came back to life. His body still remained dead and mummified, his spirit was just finally able to move to another realm when Isis put his body back together. The becoming the god of the dead was just a gift from some Gods that envied Isis' devotion.
taillesskangaru has already commented on the presence of hell and heaven in Buddhism. It is not so much that these places have temporary or permanent existence. It is more that as you migrate one between higher or lower forms of personal existence, you find your environment changes. Your stay in these places is finite because your lifetime as each form of being is finite.
So as a hell-being, as seen from a Buddhist point of view, you will see your environment as a hell for the duration of your lifetime as a hell-being. And as a god (yes being a god is a possible future or past for each of us according to Buddhism - though not necessarily a desirable one!) you will see your environment as a heaven for the duration of your probably very long lifetime as a god. (There are extensions of this, such as "pure lands", but I'm trying to keep it simple - really I am!
) In the same way, of course, one's lifetime as a human being is finite, and during that time you will see your environment pretty much as you see it today. 
And there is most definitely salvation in Buddhism, but it is an entirely different notion than, say, in Christianity. In Buddhism, salvation is entirely up to you. It is your personal responsibility and your personal opportunity. And it's usually called liberation, rather than salvation, because it is seen as becoming free/liberated of the otherwise endless cycle of birth, suffering, death and rebirth that is otherwise the lot of every being. (However, you are completely free to choose to continue to keep on suffering, if that's what you want!
) This is seen as in contradistinction to other religions in which you may abdicate your personal responsibility to someone/something else to save you.Nevertheless, despite that personal responsibility, the Mahayana varieties of Buddhism also offer the possibility (for everyone) of going for full enlightenment - or Buddhahood - instead of just personal liberation. This is closer to the common notion of salvation because having realized how bad it is to keep suffering yourself, you are inspired to help others avoid that if they so wish. How to do that? By putting yourself in the best position to help them - by becoming a Buddha yourself. But even when you attain that, what you are doing, at best, is helping other beings fulfill their own responsibility!
Personally, we should avoid talking about "Buddhism" as some sort of monolithic whole just as much as we seem to be eschewing doing the same to "Christianity". It does a great disservice to the religion by drawing the eye to the bland 'Westernised' version that celebrities like to peddle around for sale. I know it was a convenient academic conceit into the twenties to see everything in those terms and that it has now translated into a ridiculously overused staple of popular culture but can we please avoid that. Taillesskangaru and I have already pointed out two major exceptions to the generalisation and I don't want to have go into the really unusual stuff like Tantric Buddhism for more.
Well, I'm not a scholar. There are so many divisions and sects in Buddhism with little in common except that they call claim to be following the teachings of the Buddha. It's just more convenient, if misleading, to cover them all with the blanket term "Buddhism" and IMO, it's good enough for the context of the discussion as long as we keep it in mind and don't fall into the trap of seeing it as a monolithic bloc.
We seem to have fallen into that with the OP. It hasn't got measurably better since then. I'm not saying that we can't discuss it, I'm just saying that an appropriate level of care should be taken to at least acknowledge the differences or even just be cognisant of the risk of over generalising. Its a pet hate of mine, possible overreaction noted.
I'm not sure most Old Testament scholars would agree with that. Personally I don't see any reason to suppose that either of the creation myths of Genesis are intended to be allegorical - indeed I'm not convinced that the concept of "allegory" would even have been known to Bronze Age authors. In my view the stories are supposed to be taken literally, at least to the extent that any myths are. They're just false, that's all.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Christianity was influenced by Zoroastrianism, as far as I know.
On the OP: you seem to be using "mythology" to mean "old stories that are not true". This is not how religious scholars use the term. "Mythology" is a genre of narrative, and whether something is "myth" or not has got nothing to do with whether it's true or false.
Students of religion have long recognised that all attempts to categorise religions in this way are really just reflections of the views of the person doing the categorising. For example, you say:
madviking said:
But why is "salvation" essential for religion? What makes you say that? I'd say that that just shows your own bias resulting from your own Christian or post-Christian culture. A Hindu or a Daoist or a Muslim would deny that religion is all about "salvation". They would all identify quite different things as being central to it. Similarly, what makes you think that "order and spirituality" are characteristic of "philosophy"? That's not what the word "philosophy" means to me.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That's a little unfair, don't you think? Human folklore abounds with allegorical stories, in a variety of unrelated cultures, many of which were relatively primitive. It's not as if the allegory was a literary technique developed by Aesop himself, and just happened to get a bit trendy.
Which isn't to suggest that the Hebrew creation myth is any sort of allegory (I've never really understood why the Hebrews are presumed to have be so wise as to realise their myth a fiction, but the Babylonians, Norse, Mexica, etc. were not), simply that I don't see why we would presume that allegory would be an alien concept to that culture.
Can you give any examples?
I wouldn't call Aesop's fables "allegories". They are more like parables. An "allegory" isn't simply a story with a moral or a deeper meaning beyond the literal. In an allegory, each element of the story is supposed to represent something else, so it is quite complex. In a parable, the story is not meant to be taken literally and it has some "point" or moral, but each element in the story isn't supposed to represent some particular element of the non-literal meaning.
By the way, I only just noticed the comments about Christianity and Egyptian mythology. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that Christian beliefs were influenced by those in the slightest. This is mainly because the differences between the Egyptian and Christian beliefs are far greater than any superficial similarities. They are really nothing like each other at all. And I can guarantee that you wouldn't find any respectable scholar today suggesting that the context for the emergence of primitive Christian doctrines should be sought not in first-century Judaism (by far its most obvious matrix), or hellenic culture (the next most obvious one), but in ancient Egyptian cults (a much more remote one). I mean, why suppose that the Christians took the idea of resurrection from the Egyptians rather than from the Pharisees, when (a) the Egyptian concept of resurrection was very different from that of the Christians, and (b) we know that the Pharisees believed in a resurrection similar to that which the Christians believed in, (c) we know that Jesus and the first disciples encountered Pharisees, and some of the early Christians themselves were Pharisees, notably Paul, and (d) the Gospels suggest that in his own lifetime people associated Jesus with the Pharisees on this topic? Why look for an explanation in the remote and unlikely when there's a perfectly good explanation in the near and probable?
I wouldn't call Aesop's fables "allegories". They are more like parables. An "allegory" isn't simply a story with a moral or a deeper meaning beyond the literal. In an allegory, each element of the story is supposed to represent something else, so it is quite complex. In a parable, the story is not meant to be taken literally and it has some "point" or moral, but each element in the story isn't supposed to represent some particular element of the non-literal meaning.
By the way, I only just noticed the comments about Christianity and Egyptian mythology. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that Christian beliefs were influenced by those in the slightest. This is mainly because the differences between the Egyptian and Christian beliefs are far greater than any superficial similarities. They are really nothing like each other at all. And I can guarantee that you wouldn't find any respectable scholar today suggesting that the context for the emergence of primitive Christian doctrines should be sought not in first-century Judaism (by far its most obvious matrix), or hellenic culture (the next most obvious one), but in ancient Egyptian cults (a much more remote one). I mean, why suppose that the Christians took the idea of resurrection from the Egyptians rather than from the Pharisees, when (a) the Egyptian concept of resurrection was very different from that of the Christians, and (b) we know that the Pharisees believed in a resurrection similar to that which the Christians believed in, (c) we know that Jesus and the first disciples encountered Pharisees, and some of the early Christians themselves were Pharisees, notably Paul, and (d) the Gospels suggest that in his own lifetime people associated Jesus with the Pharisees on this topic? Why look for an explanation in the remote and unlikely when there's a perfectly good explanation in the near and probable?
LightSpectra
me autem minui
It seems quite clear to me that at least the pre-Abram parts of the Book of Genesis are intended to be allegorical. Why does God have to ask Adam how he knew he was naked? Why does God have to physically come down and see the Tower of Babel? Why does God hate Esau when it's made perfectly clear that he hates no human being, only human motives and actions?
Judaic theology may have been quite primitive at this point in time, but these things clearly contradict what the Jews thought of God. To have taken these ideas literally would've been tantamount to heresy.
None of the major religions are of a single nature; they all have many subsets and variations that can be as different as night and day.
BTW, you neglected to include Sufism, the mystical variant of Islam, in your list.
BTW, you neglected to include Sufism, the mystical variant of Islam, in your list.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Perhaps you're right. I was taking "allegory" to refer to an extended metaphor, analogy or piece of symbolism, but if it has a stricter definition than I am allowing it, I may well be incorrect.
This is what I get for contradicting a theologian, I suppose.
