Organized religions change when not changing risks harming their bottom line. I think it’s as simple as that.
This is, if not downright wrong, at least controversial or complicated. For starters, IIUC Judaism did not then and does not now have an official position regarding an afterlife, let alone what determines a person’s place there.
I don’t think you can say that everything that a religion believes is a tenet of that religion. Some of the things a religion says are just rules that are derived from its central tenets.
To use a non-religious example, suppose I subscribe to the tenet that people should obey the law. There’s a speed limit in my town that prohibits people from driving over 25 mph. So I refuse to drive at higher speeds.
Then the town changes the speed limit to 40 mph. I now happily drive at that speed (while never driving above it).
Am I a hypocrite for my willingness to now drive at a speed that I previously thought was wrong? No. Because my guiding principle was not that driving above 25 mph was wrong. My principle was that breaking the law was wrong. And I have been holding to that principle all along even as circumstances change.
Similarly I feel a religion can hold to its central unchanged tenets while adapting some of its rules to changes in society.
Exactly. Religion as I know it personally has established practices that have been plucked out of scripture like panned flakes of gold in an attempt to develop a set of behaviors that are pleasing to the deity. Some of them are attempts to put into practice actual commandments that sometimes seem cut and dried, until you put one foot forward, then realize you don’t really know where to go.
Specifically, for example, how do I, a women, go about not wearing men’s clothes? Does that mean borrowing clothes that actually belong to a man? wearing clothes made with the intent of them being sold to a man, but he can’t pay for them, and never wears them? wear only clothes of a specific design or style that are markedly “women’s”? What if I am in a situation where I would otherwise be naked in front of Jewish men? would it then be permissible to wear men’s clothes, because that would be a lesser transgression than appearing naked? What if my life is threatened, and I need to disguise myself as a man? is that permissible?
So we hunt through scripture, and not just the Torah, but the writing, that prophets, the commentary, and do our best to answer these questions.
Then, there is a radical change in society-- clothes sold off the rack. There are clothes made intended for a man, but not a specific man; can I buy those? Time for more searching. If the answer to this is “Yes,” I may buy those, and because they belong to me, and have never belonged to anyone else, they are in a legitimate sense, “women’s clothes.”
The original rule, “Women should not wear men’s clothes” has not changed, however, just because I can now own jeans bought in the men’s department.
Likewise for the things on your list:
Aside from the fact that how following these tenets might have been outlined 2000 years ago, and now some new circumstance might lead to new guidelines that do permit homosexuality in some situations, my first thought here was this:
- Define “homosexuality”
- Define “marriage”
- Define “slavery”
Eventually, you may get to the core of what the prohibitions are about.
Jews
I’m going to need a cite for this. And your cite cannot be the gospels.
Judaism in the present hold that deeds are more important than faith, and it has not corrupted us over the last 2,000 years. Deeds are not meant to secure a place in an afterlife, which many Jews do not believe in anyway-- and that was equally true 2,000 years ago. Deeds are done to fulfill mitzvot because they are mitzvot, and also because it creates harmony among people who must live together.
I know of no mitzvah that can be purchased away-- as in, pay a fee, and you can skip a fast, or curse your mother, or work on Shabbes. Donating money to help the poor is a mitzvah, but you cannot do only that one and no other. There was also a very minimal Temple tax 2,000 years ago (which could be waived for a very poor person), but you couldn’t just do this one and no others either.
My guess is that Horseflesh is referring to the medieval Catholic practice of “indulgences”.
The religious institutions that are most resistant to change are those that tend to be anti-democratic. In that case, we’re not talking as much about a true religion or belief system but rather a canon that preserves institutional power.
No, Horseflesh specifically says “Jewish tenet”; not even “Jewish practice.” So, in other words, an official doctrine of Judaism, not just a tradition. (Not that it was ever either.)
Schisms and reforms are common to all the modern forms of religion I can think of offhand. They happen when a religion has not changed sufficiently to reflect the times, or has wandered away from what its original attraction was.
Protestantism in its myriad varieties, for example, was and remains a response to just those pressures.
That was my first thought, but re-reading it, I think he’s talking about the “money lenders in the temple” scene from the NT. Which, AIUI, didn’t have anything to do with “buying your way into the afterlife,” and was mostly about fleecing pilgrims.
They were money-changers. Roman coins had an image of Caesar on them. Because human images are not permitted in Judaism, you could not pay the Temple tax, make an offering, nor purchase an animal for sacrifice right there at the Temple, using Roman coins. The money-changers exchanged the Roman coins that many people from far-off areas of Judah had, for kosher money without images on it.
I don’t know whether they charged a specific fee for this, or just put out a tip jar, but it’s what they did all day, and it was a necessary service-- their livelihood, in other words.
If Jesus had a problem with it, it wasn’t with the money-changers, it was with the priests and Levites, who did not hire people to perform the service for free, and paid them with portions of their share of the sacrifices.
On the other hand, I think that Herod had put a puppet high priest in the Temple. He may or may not have been Aharonic, but he wasn’t the person who was supposed to be the high priest. Herod himself was a puppet of the Romans.
I think a more interesting topic is what this OP says about @Velocity. Not to pick on him specifically, but to notice how he, a decent chap overall, is an unwitting exemplar of a deep-seated cultural trend in the US. As he’s said more than once, he’s the less-than-happy result of a very “conservative” culturo-religious upbringing. He’s now opening his eyes and is sometimes a bit confused and consternated by what he’s seeing.
His natural idea of what a religion IS is that it’s a list of behavioral taboos. It’s not faith, it’s not love, it’s not ceremonies, it’s not the Universe, it’s not even afterlife; it’s social taboos. That’s how he was raised. Religion is equivalent to social strictures. And he’s far from alone in that instinctive POV.
Assuming the desire for religion / spirituality / deeper meaning is a common feature of most (certainly not all) people’s natures, how can we prevent or ameliorate this confusion / conflation of the spiritual with the socially coercive?
Religion is more often used to justify what one wants to do anyway, than to motivate to do what one doesn’t want to do.
It’s much easier to say that religion informs your decision to not bake a cake for a SSM, than it is to accept that your religion tells you that you should give all of your worldly possessions away to the poor.
Change your church. It’s the fundie/evangelical churches, and the reactionary wing of the Catholic church (which is only a wing, by the way, there’s a lot more liberalism in the RCC than parts of the hierarchy wants to admit) that are all about judgement, now and in the hereafter. Lots of churches to choose from which are far closer to the teachings of the Teacher.
Yeah, this.
Or at least explore religion - take a comparative religions class - there is probably something on YouTube. Take an hour a week to learn something about a new faith. Look at something completely different that what you were raised with (Buddhist/Pagan for a lot of Christians, one of the cousin faiths (Islam/Judaism), or look at a different sect of Christianity.
Take some time to learn about the History of Religion. Learn the history of the sect you were raised in, or maybe something different. Watching witch crushing Puritans evolve into Bernie-Sanders-loving, gay-marrying, pronoun-introducing Unitarian Universalists over the course of 250 years was eye opening. And while it didn’t happen in a day - you see a reasonable progression.
Looking a History of Religion, you start to realize that its a LONG road from pre-Christian faiths to the present. And that sometimes new things are really old (if you think modern religious cults are nuts, take a look at the 16th century Anabaptist Jan of Leiden).
Back before The Bad Times I used to teach Sunday School at a Unitarian Universalist Church. Comparative Religion for elementary school students was among my favorites.
I think we need to call out a few facts.
A) Religion is also an attempt to influence society to having a single set of values.
If slavery is legal and profitable, why shouldn’t people feel good about it’s practice? If your nation requires another generation of children for the workforce and the battlefield, why not leave LGB people miserable if means you get what you want?
It’s easy to hate on Nietzsche for the terrifying implications of creating a new morality, but this kind of creating a morality is a fact. To this day, organized religion is directly allied to oppressive regimes. Some of the real bad guys throughout history would create a ‘Cult of Personality’ that tries to bend things in their favor.
B) Monotheistic Evangelical faiths seem to promote consolidation and conquest of pluralistic or polytheistic countries and states.
There are endless examples. The Teutonic Order; The Viceroyalty of New Spain, The explosive speed in which Islam gained North Africa. Divided or non-existent unity is an opportunity for conquest or control by one’s more powerful neighbors.
The questions, doubts or perhaps even full failure of this morality to be coherent does jack all against a bunch of religiously united thugs, which is the point. You want those thugs to be working for you.
C) Religion is here to stay.
Even explicitly atheistic nations, like the Soviet Union, wound up turning Communism into a sort of faith all its own. Cults of personality, ideology or idolatry will always emerge, as humanity simply has an inbound desire to believe in something larger than itself.
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Religion doesn’t need to be ‘correct’, correct is determined by inquisitors, state policy and pure force. It keeps the king’s butt squarely on the throne. It rewards people for playing by the society’s rules and punishes them for straying from them. It is not redundant, because the sphere of morality is not a body of law or a family tradition.
Bear in mind, I’m not going to personally defend this concept. But if everyone does something wicked, wouldn’t people want to be vindicated and have their conscience eased by holy writ or holy authority? The list of abuses here are tiny compared to things like:
-Human Sacrifice
-Bride Kidnapping
-Ethnic Cleansing / Genocide
-State Sponsored Violence
Religions that are too tainted by their connection to atrocities or evils can simply be replaced with untainted ones, and the cycle goes ever on. 2+2 doesn’t equal 5; what if it equals 3 instead? Perhaps 22 instead? That 3, 5 and 22 are wrong answers doesn’t mean squat if people will live and die for belief in them.
Intellectual honesty is unimportant to religion at large. It’s not been about being right, it’s about being useful. The thugs who believe in the faith are far more numerous and far more important than a handful of philosophers. We do not fear disagreements with responsible debaters; we fear those thugs.
Yeah, slip of the keyboard there, sorry.
Well, maybe. There’s certainly plenty of room in that setup for the money changers to be complicit in the exploitation of pilgrims, or even be the primary drivers of it. The money changers could be regularly lying about the proper exchange rate, or making up taxes and levies that don’t really exist, and pocketing the difference without the priests knowing about it. Or the priesthood could be actively looking for money changers who are willing to fleece pilgrims and split the profits with the priests, and keeping any honest money changers from being able to setup a stall.
Or more to the point with the OP, there are fundamental, essential teachings, and there are derived or incidental teachings about how to achieve the fundamental, essential teachings.
So if you did have a religions whose fundamental, essential core teaching is a specific stricture of social behavior, as opposed to a concept of your place in the universe and how to relate to it, then well, yes, it will have a damn hard time staying alive. But not all, and maybe only a minority of, religions are exclusively about that.
To stay in the Judeo/Christian tradition: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these hang all the law and the prophets.” That is an extraordinarily basic yet broad and non-micromanaged core, upon which you then may issue laws, or preach about what’s the right way to live that way. Which may be universal or specific to a certain people or a certain time or a certain situation. Which may be issued under a premise of literal infallibility or a premise of inspired interpretability. Which a preacher or teacher may get wrong and teach wrong.
Was the mayor/city council the arbiter of all morality? Does religion in your view involve God taking a vote on what is moral?
Laws and the legal system is based around the concept that humans are fallible, and thus they can be changed with different circumstances.
Morality as defined by God should not be changeable. See the difference?
I have heard the excuse given that people back then were just not advanced enough to be ready for such innovative ideas like slavery is wrong. Seems easier to implement than the kosher laws, not to mention the details of rules in the Torah.
The following is not in response to you, but is more general.
Yeah, even atheists admit that religion has some social benefits. So does Star Trek fandom and knitting clubs. These latter two human activities don’t have holy wars or try to oppress people quite so much.
Some people said that religion isn’t about god’s moral rules, and anyhow who knows what they are. So it is okay to throw some stuff in the Bible away. Fine with me - please give me some rules about what to toss and what to keep. It always seems to boil down to what the person feels is moral. All morality is basically atheistic - some people pull in God to justify what they want to do.
Religion is about our place in the universe? Sure, but so is philosophy. The difference between theology and philosophy is that theology claims to have access to the answers in back of the book. But theologian A’s answer book looks different from theologian B’s. And you aren’t allowed to see it to check.
This kind of sums it up.
Practically speaking, this is true. But religions claim that they are a reflection - a rendering - of the thinking of God. Unless God evolves, which most gods won’t do since they are perfect, religion should not either.
Now, any God worthy of mention could clear this up in a second, just by showing up. If he doesn’t, either he doesn’t care or he doesn’t exist. I’m for the latter possibility, of course, but if you for the former then why are you worshiping a god who doesn’t care what you do?
BTW, if you are of the school that says that God revealing himself will destroy faith and free will, you should read the story of the Golden Calf, where those who had direct exposure to God managed to have plenty of free will.
The part of the Bible where the first part of that comes from does not mention the love they neighbor part. And that same Bible gives all sorts of detailed rules which violating leads to death. Nice work throwing away most of it because you don’t like it. Not that I blame you for not liking it, since I’m sure you are a lot more moral than the writers of the Bible.
But if you think the stuff you like comes from God, and the stuff you don’t like doesn’t, how do you make that assessment?