Taking the Mask Off of Christianity, page 8

Yes I know of one, Salvation. For it is grace we are saved not works!

There are many things.

I am an agnostic, so if Christianity had copied off of its neighbor's page, then it'd all be the same to me. But it is obvious that it didn't copy. Christianity is plagiarized makes a great meme, and provides yet another excuse to moan about the plight of the ever put-upon "masses." But it ain't so.

All human activities will draw from the common well of the shared stock of human symbolic thought. Our symbols are shared because our environmental features (sun, moon, plants, animals ...) are shared. So is our "template biography" (everyone starts in the womb, emerges into the world, grows up, discovers sex, almost everybody makes some use of it, most have children, all begin to decline, and all die). The architecture of the human nervous system is shared, too.

The resemblance among different people's dreams is at least as startling as the resemblance among their religions. If last night, you dreamt that you were walking around in a house with three levels, and when you went into the basement, you found... - did you steal that dream from Carl Jung? Did you "borrow" that dream from Carl Jung?

No, you dreamt it for the same reason that Carl Jung dreamt it. The familiar house as a symbol of the individual mind and of his or her life story is part of the common heritage of mankind. You cannot steal what you already own by birthright, you cannot steal from someone whose exclusive property the thing never was.

Personally, I imagine any religion as a tar baby. They all pick up things by accretion from the cultures in which each of them operates. You see that very clearly in Buddhism.

Evangelical religions, like Buddhism or Christianity, displace earlier practices whenever the religion is adopted in a new place. To function effectively, it must provide solutions to all of the cultural aspects of life that the displaced religion used to cover.

So, for example, how do we celebrate the winter solstice now that we're not sun worshippers anymore? And we will celebrate - all humans everywhere hold parties when good things happen.

How about scheduling the observance of Jesus' birth to coincide with the winter solstice? (Um, that is not the anniversary of his birth, not his "birthday." Christians do not claim to know the date of his birth, and those who guess tend to place it in the fall or spring based on when shepherds would spend the night outdooors with their sheep.) Yes, why not?

It is a given that we shall hold a party when the sun ends its decline and begins its reascent towards full strength. We needn't worship the sun to rejoice that the cold spell will soon turn around. Being mammals explains our interest, being observant of environmental regularities sets the date.

And what shall we do to celebrate?

Well, last year, we threw an especially big log on the hearth fire, to represent the world tree from which Odin sacificed himself to himself, blah, blah, blah. Well, Odin's toast this year, but burning a really big log in the wintertime? That could work. Why don't we keep on doing that?

And so, a thousand years and change later, a religion founded in 1950, more or less, will claim that the Pope stole Yule logs from their co-religionists to secure his hold on the masses. Sure he did.

[edit on 17-10-2009 by eight bits]