[QUOTE=Voyager]
But, what would you call your theology - which is different from beliefs. Is it based on reasoning from the natural world? It’s certainly possible for a religion to have Nature as its Scriptures. That’s a set of axioms that is hard to disagree with, but the chain from there to a set of beliefs is something else.
I’d suspect that the very earliest religions reasoned from the fact that there were droughts and seasons and volcanos to the conclusion that powerful gods controlled them. Only after that did someone write scriptures and claim they were revealed - no doubt after priests claimed a direct connection with the gods.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if that were a goodly chunk of the origin of some of the early stuff, but I’m not sure it can be said to be all of it, because, as you note, it’s hard to get from that sort of observation to a set of beliefs.
As both of my religions are heavily praxis-rooted, a lot of my theological work starts at ritual and goes back from there. It’s one thing to say ‘we in this religion do these things, because they are the things we do in our religion’, but the underpinnings of why do we do this are important too (and frankly, it’s a level that I think that most modern pagans are sorely lacking in, sometimes maddeningly so).
Starting from a basis of ‘this is what we do’, there are a couple of directions to take ‘why’, and all of them are productive. The most fact-based is going back on a chain of “This is what I was taught” or “This is how the ancients appear to have done it” (one of these is appropriate for one of my religions; the other for the other), and one can chase back along that along either the threads of who taught what when or into archaeology, anthropology, and ancient history. There’s also the ‘because it works for what we’re trying to do’, which forks into ‘why do we think it works’ and ‘why do we think that’s a worthwhile thing to do’, the latter of which is more likely to lead into mythology, intepretations of lore, and to a certain extent cultural studies.
The subfield of theology I’m personally most interested in is systematics – which the person-with-a-theology-degree I chat with describes “as a 3D framework of interconnecting pieces, where when you wiggle one, the whole thing wiggles”; the system of relationships between all the parts. She suggests that covering a basic sense of the systematics of a religion includes (quoting again from my notes): “a) scripture/foundation myths; b) beliefs; c) liturgy and ceremonies, particular changes in life; and d) how to be X in everyday life and maybe e) private spirituality vs. public spirituality”. (Her training is Christian; I believe one of her theology degrees is from a Catholic school and the other from a Methodist one.)
The thing is, chasing back the whys eventually leads us to places where we don’t know where stuff came from. There is some evidence, for example, that some of the myths in Egypt arose to explain why people were performing specific rituals – and we have no bloody idea where the rituals themselves came from. We can look at when they were done, how they were done, how they were changed and embellished over time, and so on, but where it came from? Lost in the mists of pre-history.
For example: a goodly chunk of Egyptian theology is rooted in the notion that the universe was created perfect, and that it is the work of men and gods to maintain it in as close to perfection as possible. From this one can derive things like purity strictures fairly easily (dust and muck is imperfect; clean it up). The basic structure of the Egyptian temple is, as one goes deeper into the inner sanctum, intended to get closer and closer to the moment of creation; in the holy of holies, the decor and design is entirely intended to represent the First Time itself, with whatever god happens to live there placed as Creator; there’s a huge amount of structure that only makes sense in the context of that knowledge (such as ‘the outer walls have foundations dug down to groundwater’). The rituals are based in this conceptual understanding, and can be judged by how well they fulfil the goal of taking the universe in to have its oil changed and tyres checked. And so on.
But all of those depend on the axiom ‘the universe was created perfect, and it’s our job to keep the grit out of the gears’. Which isn’t scriptural – it’s a cultural assumption, perhaps. Mindset. It’s something that can be derived in interesting ways from the Egyptian landscape, which was both harsh and abundant (it would provide anything its people needed most of the time, so long as they treated the landscape in certain ways), but there’s a human leap there about what that means. Their leap was to a fundamentally ordered cosmos which could be pushed out of whack by entropy or error.
For more modern religions, it’s easier to chase down practices. We can point at someone and say “This guy came up with this stuff.” But that doesn’t remove the responsibility to work out why one’s doing this stuff and, for that matter, what it means to do this stuff. My purely modern-pagan religion includes, for example, a theological principle of not allowing oneself to be warped into submission to others. The “what does this mean” questions for this are extensive.
For example, “Is this job compatible with my religion?” is a theological question; I’ve been faced with the question of whether doing something I find morally objectionable because otherwise I may be fired violates that principle of not being untrue to myself and my faith. (At the time, the answer was “Truely, myself needs to pay the rent and my student loan,” but it was a damn difficult choice.) Someone with certain sorts of sexual kinks will have to decide if the submission they want in the bedroom is compatible with that faith, and I know people who come down on both sides of that one. Another interesting theological question for that same principle: is “Being true to oneself” really a virtue to pursue if one is truly, in essence, a jerk? (My personal problem with a lot of self-realisation theologies is that they tend to break down messily when someone is looking for justification to be an asshole.)
I’m pretty sure I’m babbling a bit incoherently here, but I hope there’s something in there that was coherent.
But, what would you call your theology - which is different from beliefs. Is it based on reasoning from the natural world? It’s certainly possible for a religion to have Nature as its Scriptures. That’s a set of axioms that is hard to disagree with, but the chain from there to a set of beliefs is something else.