Originally Posted by Malachi151

barre: Calling Christianity a "primitive religion" is a factually incorrect statement, it is NOT a primitive religion, and this isn't a matter of semantics it is an absolute fact.

A lot of study has been put into the field of anthropology and religious history, we have a very good understanding of the evolution of religions and religious belief in human civilization.

Calling Christianity a "primitive" religion completely ignores that research and undermines the entire field of religion evolution.

Christianity is a highly evolved religion, the ideas of which developed in human civilization over thousands of years. It bears no resemblance at all to the earliest forms of religion and pseudo-religion.

For example, "primitive religions" typically lack any concept of an afterlife, and certainly any concept of a "heaven" or "new world" as Christianity contains.

"Primitive religions" lack the concept of a universal god. An inherent trait of primitive religion is that the gods are tribal, not universal, and this is in fact what we see in the Old Testament.

The most primitive religions in fact lack even concepts of morality or laws or right and wrong, they typically are focused only on trying to appease gods through ritual and sacrifice and they offer no moral guidance.

You can call it a brutal religion if you want, but not a "primitive" one. That is a very specific term that has a very definite meaning and it can't be applied to Christianity.

Once can claim that a tiger is a very brutal killer, but not that it is a primitive animal, a tiger is a "highly evolved" form. A primitive form would be something like a stromatalite.

You can claim that MMA is a brutal bloodsport, but not that its a primitive sport. MMA is the most advanced combat sport there is, it is highly evolved. It developed after boxing and integrates techniques from many different, more primitive, ancestor combat techniques. It combines those into a more advanced and more brutal combat sport.

To call Christianity "primitive" is to claim that the ideas contained in it date far back into human civilization, but in fact they don't. Most of the major ideas contained within Christianity developed from the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century CE. They are relatively recent religious concepts. They are not concepts that we find in older religions.

The idea of the primacy of "faith" is in fact a "recent" concept. More primitive religions don't have this concept, in fact many older "more primitive" religions are more grounded in material observation than later religions. As religions evolved it became increasingly farther removed from reality, and thus in more primitive religions we often find that they are based on natural observations and deal mostly with worldly events. Over time religion became less interested in worldly events and more interested in a completely fabricated reality.

Even Judaism is a much less primitive religion than many of the competing religions of tis own time. People point to things like to story of Abraham and Isaac, where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his own son, then tells him not to, as an example of the "barbarity" of the religion, but in fact the opposite is the case. That story is a commentary on the more primitive practice of human sacrifice, and is a story about the end of human sacrifice. Many cultures in fact continued to practice human sacrifice long after the Jews stopped. Greeks and Romans were still engaging in human sacrifice in the 1st century. THATS primitive!

Judaism is certainly less primitive than the earlier Sumerian and Babylonian religions, and Christianity of course is less primitive still, indeed it is a highly evolved and sophisticated organized religion.