Maybe I’m fighting the hypothetical here, but there aren’t really any religions that have such specific tenets. I guess there may have been, but they haven’t survived, as society changed.
Religion is like any other meme – the ones that survive are the ones that can adapt to changing conditions, just like organisms that survive are the ones that can adapt to a changing environment.
So, a successful religion will have general, unfalsifiable things as its tenets – God is love, faith in God can get you to the (unprovable) afterlife, we do these things as part of our agreement with (an unknowable) God.
If I were to start a religion that had, as its foundational principle, that I’m god and will actually live forever in this world and not grow old, well, as soon as I grew old and died, the religion would fall apart as well. There are tons of cults that fall apart when the founder dies or when some predicted event fails to come about.
So, if the foundational tenet is God is love or you can be saved through faith or whatever, there’s no reason why the details can’t be changed to adapt to changing society. Religions that can’t do that don’t make it.
Except when someone wants his followers to do something, in which case he claims to understand the intentions of God just fine.
If God says “don’t eat pork” we can argue endlessly over what god’s reasons are for saying that, but we can’t really argue about what he said, can we?
You must never have met a Baptist. The truth of the Bible is certainly a tenet of some religions, and it can be falsified. But falsification assumes that a party is willing to be shown wrong. I’ve seen a video clip of a preacher saying “if the Bible said 2 + 2 = 5, I’d believe it.” And I know a woman, not a Baptist but even worse, who is a Flat Earther because she thinks the Bible says that.
Unless my Eastern religions class in college was way off, the Buddha was not a god at all, and I liked Buddhism as not having any gods at all, at least in some versions. Now it makes some claims about the universe I doubt, but I wouldn’t criticize it a bit.
I am Jewish, and Judaism is tribal as opposed to being a set of beliefs you must accept. Thus the different versions which have different opinions of whether you have to follow the laws exactly.
Pagan gods were neither omnipotent or ominbenevolent - often not benevolent at all. I don’t know how pagan religions would react to change, since they flourished in a time of relatively little change. What kind of moral rules did they enforce, anyway? Most of the ones from Western religions those gods flouted.
The God in my Bible changed his mind early when he interacted directly with people - in other words, when he was more like a pagan god. A good reason for that God not being real either.
I hope you are aware that the Golden Rule, while in the Torah, was called important by Hillel who died in 10 CE. So let’s not say this was somehow different from Judaism - or any kind of reform.
And this plays into the evolutionary view of religion we were talking about above. Just as natural selection is about reproductive advantage, a religion emphasizing getting converts is going to be relatively successful. Islam did this also. What God wants or says has nothing to do with it.
One important feature of sales is removing things that will keep your customers from buying. Potential customer likes shellfish. Boom, there go the Kosher laws.
God used to be fine with other nations not worshiping him, since they were not part of the Covenant and so were not covered by the rules.
The question is, what does god want of those who worship him. A lot more in the old days. The two things I see that explain the new rules are the changes made for marketing purposes and the changes from the rather nutty world view of people like Paul.
Baptists have a pretty consistent explanation of why they believe in things. Their problem comes when the Bible recommends stuff our modern moral view finds horrific. Like slavery.
The rest seem to pick and choose based on secular ethics, with theology explaining the choice as best it could. Admirable, but not much different than you’d get from working from pure spirituality.
And then you have the Catholics who as best I understand it base salvation on forgiveness for original sin which happened in an Eden they now admit never existed.
Beats the hell out of me.
The fact that God manifested as Jesus here on Earth in order to forgive mankind of our sins pretty much makes it impossible for any Christian to claim that God is unchanging. The whole religion is based on the central tenet that God changed his mind.
Despite Voyager’s irreverent and flippant tone, I think the point is essentially valid. Religions evolve, and those that appeal to enough people, survive and even multiply.
The Divine, in its ultimate and unknowable form, is unchanging in the sense that it exists eternally. Every religion has its own cultural, political, and historical interpretation of the Divine, which does not change it or indeed affect it in any way. That’s my possibly heretical opinion. The only two religions I have directly participated in, in any depth, are Mahayana Buddhism and Roman Catholicism. There are places they intersect, believe it or not. I feel both comfortable and uncomfortable with both.
The moral and political aspects of religions and sects reflect the diversity, or lack of it, in the societies in which they have their being. Schisms happen when there is pent up desire for change and the dominant religion will not make those changes. But those are, to me, the surfaces of religions, not their foundations.
Another thing we also observe, it is not unusual for some religious organization or even mere sect thereof to claim for itself that it is “the real” version of the Faith that has survived all these years being truly faithful, even if we can document that no one had heard of them before X date and even when we have the very writings of their historic leaders showing changes.
. .
Meanwhile, some religious traditions who claim to have must-follow Holy Writ have also openly owned some or much of it as allegorical/symbolic or open to nitpickery for a long time, keepting theologians employed for centuries. It’s not like anyone just noticed that recently. Heck, that is part of the reason for the rise of fundamentalism, people questioning “how come the theologians keep finessing what we can plainly read.” The fundamentalist asks himself the question of the thread title and gets an answer many of us don’t like…
True. But. (and assuming arguendo the whole idea behind the Abrahamic god isn’t pure man-made bunk.)
As you say, via Jesus God has demonstrated his ability and willingness to change his mind and tell/show us about that change.
Where the e.g. Baptists run off the rails is in insisting that next time he gives a similarly obvious sign they’ll believe it. But until then it is absolutely positively steady as she goes. So changing guidance is possible, but definitely hasn’t happened.
Agreed. Which is why it’s demonstrably bunk all the way down. Any actual diety so incompetent at getting its instructions to its subjects deserves the chaotic worship it gets in return.
Those swaths of Christianity don’t necessary believe they can completely understand the intentions of God. As an Emory University Divinity Professor once indicated to me, it’s far better and more accurate to say this is what we believe to be the intentions of God, based upon our interpretation of Scripture. Keeping open the possiblity we may be wrong.
That came up in my class also. I was quite disappointed. I take it as an indication that the need for god belief is deep in many of our psyches. Not mine, though.