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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (34516)	4/12/1999 2:24:00 PM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

Joan, thank you. I am glad we are now both on the same page, as it were. I first began thinking about the immutable core concept when I read Frazier's "The Golden Bough" many years back. The concept of sacrifice to appease the gods, creating a king who would lose his life for the good of the people, together with other ancient stories bore such a strong resemblance to the story Of Jesus that it was almost overwhelming. But in that context the question about what is the wheat and what is the chaff becomes debatable. Is the core the message of Jesus as retold in the Gospels, or is it the story of sacrifice to appease a god? Blue objected strenuously to my characterization of God because her sense of what constituted the core of religious belief (ideas like love, and redemption) differed markedly from mine. I think that hers is the part of religion that is evolving and transforming itself into new forms. I think Blue believes that the ideas of love and redemption constitute the central core-- the essence of her beliefs and she might well view those as static attributes. I hope I have not put words in her mouth. Perhaps a less threatening example: any reading of the OT leads me to believe that angels were portrayed as fearsome creatures, raining death and destruction on those who had offended God in some way. At best they were messengers of information (again, I'm not a scholar in this field so be gentle!). But now we almost universally assume a cherubic visage and a single-minded idea that these beneficent creatures have but one goal in their existence -- to enrich our lives. Is this religion? Maybe not now, but a thousand years from now who knows? Might this revisionist angel become the core of a new age polytheism? I became a non-believer because I found no cogent reason to believe. My criticism of the idea of static morality is much easier because I have not bought off on anything as a set of core beliefs. Believers have invested a great deal of emotional and intellectual capital in their religions, and so I think it becomes that much harder to view their precepts dispassionately. TTFN, CTC