So this is mostly from what Iâve gleaned as an outsider watching Jewish discussions about this and from my background as Vaguely Protestant, and Iâm sure other religions will have their own views here. Now:
Encourages having certain values/morals/behaviours out of faith/because the religionâs philosophy espouses them, rather than due to arriving at those through some process of reasoning
Christianity. Judaism encourages certain behaviors because itâs The Right Thing To Do and doing the right thing is its own reward rather than Because God Says So And Youâll Get To Go To Heaven.
The above discourages the development of critical thinking skills and encourages fundamentalist thinking and refusal to adapt to new information
Dogmatism, not inherent to religion exclusively. For bonus points, Judaism actively encourages critical thinking about the torah.
Taught to children from a young age, who therefore donât really get to consciously choose to follow the religion
On some level everything is taught to children from a young age, including nondenominational morals. That said, most protestant Christian streams that I know of will have a moment where the childâs religion stops being That Thing Mom Makes Me Do and starts being âDo you as a human person believe in this too?â, which makes proceeding a conscious choice.
Difficult to opt out of (as an adult or otherwise) without facing judgement or social consequences (depending on the community)
âdepending on the communityâ is doing a lot of legwork here. Do you know how my mom stopped being an active Christian? She stopped going. Boom, done. She still had her family and church-friends and nobody gave a shit. There are definitely Asshole Religious People who will see people leaving as betrayal, but there are Assholes about everything in that aspect. Vegans switching to low-omnivore diets for health, car-people switching to different cars, people leaving for a different company. Itâs unfair and not useful to posit this as inherent and exclusive to religion.
Offers origin myths that clash with scientific education, except where support of science is sufficient to resist it (in a constant, exhausting tug-of-war), at which point the goalposts are shifted and the origin myths are reframed as being âmetaphoricalâ
The idea that religion and science are inherently contradictory is as recent as the 19th century, popularized primarily by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Before that, they were thought to be complementary and largely the same thing. If they were found to be contradictory, well, then either one of them was being misinterpreted or we didnât know the full picture yet.
Furthermore, this is basically exclusively a feature of Fundamentalist Christianity. The Bahåʟà faith holds as its fundamental tenent that true science and the true faith cannot be in conflict. As per the son of its founder, âreligion without science is superstition and that science without religion is materialismâ.
In Hinduism, the division of objective sciences and spiritual knowledge is a linguistic paradox. The two are interwoven to the point where Hindu religious scholarism and scientific advancements were basically the same thing. Many Hindu scriptures are also scientific manuals, and vice-versa. As per Hindu sages, logical argument and rational proof using Nyaya (one of the six orthodox schools of Hinduism, roughly meaning "justice" or ârules") is the way to obtain correct knowledge about faith.
Buddhism actively encourages the impartial investigation of nature, and has a strong emphasis on causality, as does science, and Tenzin Gyatso has stated that if buddhist teachings and science are in conflict, science supercedes the teachings. "My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science, so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation."
In Islam, science is considered linked to the concept of being one with God, and nature and science are not seen as separate from religion but as a part of it and as a method of understanding Godâs work better. Science was well-studied in the pre-colonization Islamic world, and itâs not a coincidence that the worldâs first university was founded by a muslim woman (Fatima bint Muhammad Al-Fihriya Al-Qurashiya) in modern-day Morocco, starting as a mosque but turning into a place of education for more than just Islam. Ibn al-Haytham, also a Muslim, was actually one of the first people to hold the idea that that a hypothesis must be proven by experiments that were repeatable by anyone or proven by mathematical evidence, basically inventing the scientific method 200 years before Renaissance scientists. âI constantly sought knowledge and truth, and it became my belief that for gaining access to the effulgence and closeness to God, there is no better way than that of searching for truth and knowledge.â Islam is also home to the Ahmadiyya movement, which emphasizes that there is zero contradiction between Islam and science", and also 100% supports evolution as the method God used and uses to create new species.
Just because vocal Fundamentalists have decided that their form of [religion here] is the One True Truth, their creation story is Exactly How It Happened, and science is some sort of conspiracy, doesnât mean every religion is in contrast with science and believes everything happened exactly how it was written.
Sometimes results in, frankly, extremely creepy self-absorbed cult-like behaviour wherein even strangers on the internet will randomly quote religious verses at you during an argument and just expect that everyone around them, like... cares what their religious text says about this issue. How is this not an absolutely terrifying level detachment from reality?
Sooo what type of religion specifically has been quoting reigious texts and verses as a âgotchaâ? Because Iâm gonna make a wild guess here and say that it probably wasnât Jainism.
But as far as I can see, large, organised religions share most if not all of those characteristics - in fact, it would be hard for them not to, as many of these are central to a religion keeping itself alive above all others.
Most religions arenât interested in forcing others to conform or lifting themselves above all others. Judaism in particular is like âIf you want to join us go for it, but itâs gotta be your choice to seek us outâ. I also feel like itâs very disingenuous to blame religion instead of the shitheads abusing religion to force other people into their sphere of influence.
At the same time, they all have certain commonalities, or they would not all be classifiable as religions,
Thereâs actually a movement by non-Christian religions to redefine it because the Western definition of âreligionâ includes aspects that are not universal. Judaism does not mandate belief as part of being Jewish, and Hindu atheists still follow many of the rituals because they see them as separate from faith.
TL;DR if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck itâs probably fundamentalist Christianity.
snowghoul
gracieabrams
discoholicmusic
2087
baratheonpilled
