Religion
Related: About this forumLiving With Gods review: 40,000 years of religious art, and this is it?
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/06/living-with-gods-review-art-religion-british-museumThat is signalled by a large wall text at the start, suggesting that the correct name for our species may not be homo sapiens, but homo religiosus. As someone who doesnt believe in God and doesnt miss her, I felt a bit left out. Is belief really the all-pervasive force this exhibition claims?
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This still might be fascinating stuff, if the comparisons and connections between world religions were made with more depth. Is every faith knocking at the same heavens door? Living With Gods appears to be saying something as crude and trite as that. Again, it is no doubt a lot more subtle on radio. But to claim, for example, that the meanings of fire in Zoroastrianism and Christianity are ultimately aspects of the same mystical worship of flame is a completely glib erasure of the complex histories of both belief systems.
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Finding common patterns in myth, magic and belief is a vast intellectual problem. Anthropologists from JG Frazer in The Golden Bough to Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked have dedicated enormous books to it. Yet this show casually throws together artefacts embodying a vast variety of beliefs and asserts that they all share similar meanings. In reality they have all been stripped of context and history, robbed of specific content. The exhibition is designed as a dreamy white space, all mysterious cloudy screens. Its apparently meant to suggest heaven. I found it more of a sterile limbo.
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)Think of that. 40,000 years of religious belief. Perhaps we should simply dismiss 40,000 years of belief as indicative of a general lack of reasoning power, or call it mass mental illness.
Or, we could admit that religious/philosophical belief and speculation has always accompanied human sentience.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)Just because something has been around a long time, doesn't make it necessary... or good.
But thanks for confirming the bolded text.
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)and magically eliminate the very idea, the very concept, of religion and philosophy, we would have perfection?
trotsky
(49,533 posts)But if religion has been with us for 40,000 years and we still do the same horrible things to each other, is it really helping?
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)trotsky
(49,533 posts)Let me know if you ever feel like discussing your answer.
MineralMan
(146,262 posts)unexplainable. As we are able to answer more and more of those ancient questions, religion seems more and more superfluous to me.
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)Lordquinton
(7,886 posts)In fact, there's less of a clear definition of the gods than there ever has been in history. Amazing that as we gained more knowledge of the world, gods became more mysterious and indescribable, until the only descriptive feature is that you can't describe it.