What happens to old religions?

[charles brough]

World history is littered with the corpses of old mainstream religions. The Egyptian Religion developed about five thousand years ago and died of old age about two thousand years ago. That is, it was replaced with a then newer, more advanced, Christian faith. The religion of Ancient Mesopotamia died out and was replaced some two thousand five hundred years ago. The religion of the megalithic age in Europe was replaced over three thousand years ago. And, of course, the Roman and Greek Polytheism died about 350 CE when the majority of the citizens of Rome and the Empire converted to Christianity. All those older faiths now stock the “god graveyard in the sky.”

 

The old 2,500 year old ancestor worship religion of China now barely survives, being so weak and ineffectual that its believers do not even run their own country. Marxists run it. Being on its deathbed, it is even being effectively evangelized by Christians.

 

The polytheistic religion of the Hindus is too old and divided for the faithful there, also, to even run their own country. India is governed by a coalition of Marxists, Western Secularists and Muslims.

 

Both Christianity and Islam are based partially on a four thousand year old Jewish mythologically “miracle”-filled tribal history. All three faiths have also grown old and in conflict with science. Those who run Muslim, Christian and Jewish states are still of their own faith, but we cling to their old “miracles” and myths only because there is no decent alternative. Every society has to have a religion. We humans evolved in hunter/gathering size groups and only common belief systems enable us to feel a sense of community in the huge societies made necessary by our vast numbers.

 

The first religions were filled with “spirits” that supposedly inhabited everything. Then came the polytheisms, the belief in a limited number of gods. After that, we came to believe in only one “god” and a number of “helpers.” The number of “spirits” worshiped has in that way declined over the millenniums in direct proportion to how well we grew able to find natural cause and effect explanations for things. The better we came to understand ourselves and the world about us, the fewer “spirits” we needed. The new science-age religion that must eventually replace our now old and obsolete faiths will need to explain things without any help from “spirits.”

[rockytriton]

The old religions "became" Christianity. Why do you think Christmas is on December 25th, we color easter eggs on easter, the saviour was born of a virgin, and the sabbath is now on sunday?

[cotner]

Major world religions lasting a thousand plus years are still around, and flourishing, and making converts.

 

You don't believe that? Look up any almanac on religious statistics then.

 

 

Catholics and Protestants are making converts to the Christian faith, so also Muslims, and likewise Buddhists.

 

This is what I notice: the religions founded by their original mentors with the command to their followers to spread it to the four corners of the world and make disciples of all mankind, they are still very much around and vigorously thriving.

 

It is the ethnic religions, those identified with a people or nation, like Hinduism (India), Shinto (Japan), Judaism (Jews, Israelis), they are the ones which I think might suffer loss of fervor, but just the same still very visible for being substantial component of the ethnicity identifying the people or nation they are endemic with.

 

 

What we should be curious about is the phenomenon of greener pastures among the what I call liberal or liberalized or would-be liberal or enlightened persons in the modern West, that West which we can correctly co-equate with Christendom.

 

What is curious among these folks of the West? They are not happy with their traditional Christian faith, but they can't live without religion, so they look for one from elsewhere; and I can see that a lot of them take up with Buddhism, thinking that it is more intellectually [sic] satisfying than the straitjacket that is their old-time religion with emphasis on avoiding sin and keeping faithful to one's married spouse.

 

 

 

cotner

[charles brough]

The so-called "ethnic religions" you mention are all forms of (or sects or denominations of) HInduism/Buddhism originating in the merging of Indo-Aryan Vedas and the indigenous faith of the people of early India and Pakistan---excepting, of course, Judism. This whole Hindu-Buddhist faith is now very surbserviant to the Western secular ideological system and is not spreading. Younger Christianity and Islam are still spreading, but these are recent religions. Also, the spread of the later religions is not proportionate to world population growth except at the expense of the primitive animisms of Sub-Sahara Africa.

 

The last several thousand years is a small part of the human story. I was referring to the total religious heritage of the human race. The Ancient Egyptian religion, the Mesopotamian/Babylonian faith, the Persian religion of Zorastro and the big religions that preceeded them in pre-history. These were the mainstream religions, the ones that were involved in social evolution just as the big, mainstream religions are today.

[cotner]

 

[...]

 

The first religions were filled with “spirits” that supposedly inhabited everything. Then came the polytheisms, the belief in a limited number of gods. After that, we came to believe in only one “god” and a number of “helpers.” The number of “spirits” worshiped has in that way declined over the millenniums in direct proportion to how well we grew able to find natural cause and effect explanations for things. The better we came to understand ourselves and the world about us, the fewer “spirits” we needed. The new science-age religion that must eventually replace our now old and obsolete faiths will need to explain things without any help from “spirits.”

 

You give me the impression of nostalgia for the spirits inhabited religion. That is understandable.

 

The word spirit unless I am mistaken [please correct me, anyone] is from the Latin word for breath or to breathe; thus we have such words as perspiration, respiration, expiration, inspiration, possibly not conspiration or also. Spirit in English refers to the invisible thing that gives life to a living body -- most certainly also in the original Latin, spiritus.

 

Then that spirit is separated from the body and exists by itself without having to be the living agency of an animate body; but us poor humans though knowing they exist can't know their behavior like we know how our pets, dogs and cats, at home behave; wherefore our interaction with them is at most chancy and founded in most instances on some bargaining in the manner of relating with unknown but powerful fellow humans.

 

Thus ancient peoples divide, those who had some good insight, beings into two big categories, material and spiritual.

 

I don't see how any kind of science inspired religion that we could establish at present keeping to the findings of science, can't see how it will be without spirits or it won't be possible without spirits -- because whatever science has found out about everything in the known universe, there are still unknown beings and aspects of existence and realms of reality beyond science and as long as we are human beyond human access.

 

So, not to worry, we can always have spirits, and these are the agents that science has not yet come to acquaintance yet.

 

 

mdejess

[charles brough]

You give me the impression of nostalgia for the spirits inhabited religion. That is understandable.

 

 

I don't see how any kind of science inspired religion that we could establish at present keeping to the findings of science, can't see how it will be without spirits or it won't be possible without spirits -- because whatever science has found out about everything in the known universe, there are still unknown beings and aspects of existence and realms of reality beyond science and as long as we are human beyond human access.

 

So, not to worry, we can always have spirits, and these are the agents that science has not yet come to acquaintance yet.

 

mdejess

 

Well, I really have no nostalgia for "spirits" as I use the term to represent all the various assorted non-entitities that past beliefs are loaded with---such as gods, devils, demons, the soul, ghosts, munchkins and Santa Claus!

 

I never consider them to be any apart of the future course of real science but the way social science theory compromises with the "spirit" heritage is perhaps what you are claiming is normal.

 

I see science as the best way to find the natural cause and effect that most accurately describes us and the universe we live in. I presume we can better understand human consciousness without confusing it with "spirits" as early man did. With the little he understood, he was logical; but not now.