JohnG

I would also be interested in barre's opinion on this. It seems he is specifically talking about Christianity. I think I could get a better grasp of the topic if I knew to what he was comparing it.

lmbarre

Any brand of philosophical theism, for example. Pantheism . . .

lmbarre

Replace it gradually with an increasing number of enlightened people.

lmbarre

These ideas are for the intelligensia through whom society may be improved by their bringing an enlightened view of Christianity.

lmbarre

Would you have me think that a belief in the efficacy of human sacrifice is not primitive? In this regard, it is like the concept of polytheism or animism.

Toto

Pantheism is usually the equivalent of atheism. (If everything is god, there is no god outside of the world.)

All religions have primitive and barbaric roots. But some have become modernized and only preserve their primitive roots as part of their art or drama. There are still religions that actually sacrifice animals, but Christians do not, nor do they sacrifice humans.

I think this is tending more towards a GRD discussion, unless someone can bring it back to the texts.

MarkA

All religion seems to involve an element of sacrifice. I would argue that this would stem from the very earliest religious beliefs where the gods give something in return for something else. All about keeping everything in balance. After all there was no distinguishing between the supernatural and natural world. In this sense all religion should be viewed as primitive.

Even religions that have a veneer of sophistication tend to lapse into their primitive origins when under stress. When Rome was under threat from Hannibal, human sacrifice was reintroduced while the witch craze in Europe at a time of severe cultural and personal stress is well documented.

Christianity was an amalgam of Judaism and Hellenism with the latter heavily influencing the native Near Eastern religions like the cult of Adonis and even the ancient Egyptian religion that influenced Christianity as well. The violent foundations of the former is well known while the chief Hellenic influence on Christianity appears to be the rites of Dionysus and its violent practices that included sacrifice, even perhaps human sacrifice. Certainly the god himself was sacrificed but of course could not die because he was an immortal.

In this sense then Christianity is a primitive religion. Even the added layers of theological and philosophical meaning it has acquired over the centuries cannot hide its bloody, primitive core beliefs. Eternal pain on earth because of Adam and Eve; the blood sacrifice of the godhead; eternal pain after death for any transgressors and eternal damnation for all non-believers with the ascendency over their enemies by the saved chosen ones.

I tend to dispute that there is any such beast as a non-primitive religion. Religion is a belief in a supernatural reason for the cosmos and our place in it while systems of belief like Pantheism tend to be more of a philosophical case for an impersonal, remote controller of everything. Hardly a religion I think, since this ‘being’ could just as easily be substituted by an equation or a natural law.

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.

MarkA

Malachi151 Could you please provide a citation for the Greeks and Romans practicing human sacrifice in the first century.

An afterlife was a common belief of all religions as far as I can recall. Certainly the Epic of Gilgamesh refers to one as does the Egyptian Book of the Dead and all the funerary evidence from Egypt and elsewhere in the Near East. Even the burials of Neanderthals show a belief in the afterlife.

Malachi151

The burials of Neanderthals do not show a belief in an afterlife, indeed it isn't even certain that they really put flowers in the grave.

Egypt and the Sumerians, etc., were of course other advanced civilizations. The spectrum of religions goes from tribal on up. As Darwin and others noted in their journeys around the world, the most primitive cultures lacked even any concepts go gods, their views simply contained ideas of ghosts or demons. Many tribal religions have no afterlife concept, and even early Judaism had no afterlife concept. If you look at African tribal religions, very few of them even have any concept of morality. The religions served no moral purpose, it was just rituals for trying to appease the spirit world, which in many religions didn't even have any gods.

Consider the Aztec religion. Here is a religion that had plenty of human sacrifice, yet it still could not be called a "primitive: religion, it too was a highly evolved religion, sophisticated and advanced religion. Its was just a sophisticated religion that incorporated tons of human sacrifice.

As for the Romans, they do appear to have stopped the widespread practice of ritual human sacrifice by the 1st century, though its hard to tell if it still went on in some secret rituals. Obviously the events at the Colosseum were a form of human sacrifice though.