Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to That ole time religion............

The joy of sects
ER — (archived)

Every great religion has at its heart a very positive and humane message. If they didn't, they never would have caught on. Christianity, for example, is completely democratic in the sense that social status, gender, ethnicity, economic clout, etc. are irrelevant to god. Christianity, in addition, adds the remarkable proposition that the divine has taken human form and suffered as humans do.

But human beings being what they are, these faiths are hijacked by sects which pervert these values and use them for their own purposes and to justify their own prejudices. This is not the fault of the religion,
which is essentially a philosophical system capable of infinite interpretation and manipulation, but of the nature of man himself.

The monotheistic religions are particularly prone to this perversion because they admit only one doctrine, one interpretation, and they usually enforce this by means of a scriptures meant to be accepted literally. Since people tend to resist this homogeneity, religions tend to fracture into sects, and it is inevitable that some of them will be highly toxic.

It is interesting to note that polytheistic religions rarely fall into this trap. Examination of ancient texts reveals the ancient Greeks, as well as the Romans, believed all men worshipped the same gods, although different nations called them by different names and worshipped them with different rituals. Inter-religious warfare was very rare, if not nonexistent during ancient classical times. It wasn't until monotheism became widespread that inter-religious warfare became common, not only between different faiths, but amongst sects within each faith.

Different tribes and nations worshipped local gods, and conflicts between groups were not interpreted as conflicts between gods. And certainly this did not mean the denial of the existence of your rival's gods. But the arrival of monotheism changed all that, reading the Old Testament, as well as a study of religious history since the peak of the Roman Empire, makes it pretty clear that monotheism cannot tolerate rivals, even amongst other montheistic faiths.

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