Even before you go and criticize other people for what you believe they believe first I recommend finding actual people. Not knowing what you don't know is not a method of knowing the mind of others, only of knowing what you've had a representative experience of - and what you don't get at all.
You shouldn't think you know about religion unless you have a religion. Just because it rubs up against politics doesn't mean, when you know something about politics you know something about religion. It is ignorant and impolite to criticize what you only know by
stereotype. Don't trust interpretations and know who you are talking to.
That would include the people who have described religious experience as without any mystery, and people who use the word God too casually.
It goes also for those who pretend to be a special voice for the universe - which produced both the vine-grower and the crow, not to mention the intellectual and the mystic. There is as much room as there is tolerance.
So you approached the matter as a psychologist - behind you the flanks of confident Army Men and the nation, and this seems to you like something other than religion, but it is only superficially different - even if those superficial differences include a battle trench and a bitter past there is one flinch response and we call it many things, and our science theories will never be more real than our theology theories, such is the nature of ideas.
Your way is religion pretending to be without religion, and like many a rite-set before yours you aim for the same result (there is one flinch response - hammer to knee test gives a usual result... as if I need to explain that ways-of-life are never wrong or right in the way that actual people can be) and
you (your cult) don't like the competition.
Robert Graves wrote:...the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry 'true' in the nostalgic modern sense of 'the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute'. The language was tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia beganto substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsifythe myths to justify the social changes. Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron Apolloand imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed practically ever since in European schools and universities, where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind...
The genuine undivided religion of Western Civilization began with language as music and poetry as truth, it was crippled and cannibalized before Socrates time, but it still managed to get him killed for badmouthing it. When you realize that the cult of Apollo was a cult of living people with a way of life described by the cult's rituals and rationales you may be struck to notice that modernity regards mainly the interaction of still thriving cults and the Universalizing character of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity is just a poetic way of thinking about how to organize these various natural tendencies/cults. That red is rouge is rood is obvious, that god is universe is more difficult, but only because - despising each other - we refuse to allow it.
He is (was?) a military nurse in the British Armed Forces (specifically in the RAF).
- By QatzelOk
- By FiveofSwords
- By late