# Whence religion? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 13, 2013, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826 "2013-03-13T16:00:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/41 "2013-03-14T14:36:23Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > It would take a stretch to find much similarity between all of these myths, or between any of them and the resurrection of Jesus in the gospels. Was Jesus ressurected in a more meaningful way than the others? Or is the story simply more recent and better transcribed? ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/42 "2013-03-14T15:23:12Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > Was Jesus ressurected in a more meaningful way than the others? Or is the story simply more recent and better transcribed? No, what he meant was that all this talk about _‘mysterious’_ and _'telling_’ similairities between religions is much overstated. Like that silly meme that “all religions” have a flooding myth.\* hint, hint, nudge, nudge\*. ---
**Author:** ![Kepler1571](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/db5fbb/32.png) [@Kepler1571](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kepler1571)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/43 "2013-03-14T15:46:33Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I heard something interesting recently. It says the common theme in many legends of a forty-day period being associated with a trial before rebirth may originate with astronomical observation of the Pleiades. The Pleiades are a cluster of prominent stars. They rise and fall in the sky during the course of the year as the Earth moves. In the temperate zone of the Northern hemisphere they disappear from view for a period of forty days and their disappearance coincides with the vernal equinox. So every year, ancient astronomers would observe a group of well-known stars disappearing in the heart of winter and reappearing forty days later just as spring began. I thought the theory was that “forty” was just a mistranslation of an idiom that meant “a lot.” Hence, the author who wrote that it rained for forty days and forty nights was really saying, “it rained a shitload. Did I mentioned it was wet? Yeah, I think I did.” The same is probably true of a lot of the “magic numbers” that appear in scripture. It’s just bad philology, as if you translated “the whole nine yards” as the \*exact \*length of 27 feet. Which is just one more reason (of 40, naturally) that Biblical literalism is dumb. ---
**Author:** ![Kepler1571](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/db5fbb/32.png) [@Kepler1571](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kepler1571)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/44 "2013-03-14T15:50:59Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > If you choose Android, there is a big marketplace to choose from. If you choose the monotheistic Apple, you are less likely to switch manufacturers. This is especially true is the other Apple users will kill you if you switch. ---
**Author:** ![Paranoid\_Randroid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/paranoid_randroid/32/18_2.png) [@Paranoid\_Randroid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paranoid_Randroid)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/45 "2013-03-14T16:22:57Z")
> [@Kepler1571](#): > > This is especially true is the other Apple users will kill you if you switch. Clearly you haven’t looked much at the comment sections attached to smartphone reviews. When faced with even the most tepidly favorable remark about an iPhone, Android users tend to react with such frothing violence to evoke the image of a Phelps-esque clan marching with “God Hates Apple Users” signs. At one point I’d bought a Galaxy S, and when I traded it in for an iPhone 4 Sergey Brin called a fatwa on me. I had to be put under police protection and, eventually, go into hiding. If Eric Schmidt is ever resurrected as CEO then we’ll _know_ these legends are universal. ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/46 "2013-03-14T16:29:49Z")
> [@JohnnyMac](#): > > Is there something deep in the human psyche where they take root, is it some historic stage or event in our past, or is it coincidence and cultural osmosis that they take such similar forms? You may find The God Gene by Hamer interesting. IMHO it doesn’t answer the question, but does raise a lot of interesting points and relevant information. > [@Kepler1571](#): > > … as if you translated “the whole nine yards” as the \*exact \*length of 27 feet. The correct translation would be “729 cubic feet”. I suspect that just strengthens your point. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/47 "2013-03-14T17:03:38Z")
I’m not buying it. I’m not buying the Jung thing, I’m not buying the Campbell thing, I’m not buying the “oooooh archetypes” thing, I’m not buying the “all faiths have basically the same stories you guys” thing, and I’m absolutely not buying the “all faiths have a common core/origin/whatever” thing. No sirreeeeeee, I’m not buying any of it. At all. I’m grumpy and I’m gonna sit here and be grumpy about it and deny it and not buy any of it. So there. Now, it wasn’t long before I last recommended this very book on this very forum, but now I’m gonna do it again: _The Theosophical Enlightenment_, by Joscelyn Godwin. Amongst other things, it shows how a bunch of those ideas popped up amongst “gentlemen scholars” during the 18th century, who, playing fast and loose with the historical evidence, came up with the idea that way back in the day, mankind worshipped the sun and its passage through the zodiac, “creating an astronomical religion whose vestiges survive throughout the known world, and which is the origin of all known religions, including Christianity.” It was all bullshit and unfounded flights of fancy, but hey, it was a nice, roundabout way of sticking it to the (Christian) man, and so the idea spread – early occultists such as Britten, Blavatsky etc. digged it, took it up, and switched out a few details in the process (for example, adding or subtracting phallus-worship to the mix, depending on one’s sensibility). Over the next hundred years or so, increased specialization proved the grand theories of the “gentlemen scholars” wrong, and soon enough, “the only people who persisted with universal theories were the occultists or esotericists.” Uh, yeah, until Jung and Campbell and the Esalen crowd and, it seems, this Cashford character as well. ---
**Author:** ![Kinthalis](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kinthalis/32/16084_2.png) [@Kinthalis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kinthalis)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/48 "2013-03-14T19:40:05Z")
Do tell **Steken** , how exactly have the “occultists” been sticking it to the (Christian) man? Wait, before you get started, let me just put up this cross here. Feel free to jump on, when you’re ready. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/49 "2013-03-14T20:15:24Z")
> [@Kepler1571](#): > > This is especially true is the other Apple users will kill you if you switch. Well, the try to, but they try to get to your house using Apple Maps and wind up in the middle of a river or something. ---
**Author:** ![Paranoid\_Randroid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/paranoid_randroid/32/18_2.png) [@Paranoid\_Randroid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paranoid_Randroid)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/50 "2013-03-14T20:16:09Z")
> [@Kinthalis](#): > > Do tell **Steken** , how exactly have the “occultists” been sticking it to the (Christian) man? If I read **Steken** ’s statement correctly, not so much did occultists wish to stick it to the Christian but rather “gentlemen scholars” of the eighteenth century. (Presumably Blavatsky et al. were merely themselves bamboozled.) I admit I’ve never encountered the phrase “gentlemen scholars” with reference to unscrupulously careless mythologists who aim to assemble anti-Christian propaganda, but there you go. As for Campbell etc., I’ll note that just because one _can_ describe the gospel as sharing elements of its structure with other stories doesn’t mean that the gospel is false. It may be that some individuals have exaggerated the similarities holding between Christianity and other myths, but I fail to see why this simply must be an objectionable activity full stop. ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/51 "2013-03-14T20:32:57Z")
> [@Kinthalis](#): > > Do tell **Steken** , how exactly have the “occultists” been sticking it to the (Christian) man? > > Wait, before you get started, let me just put up this cross here. Feel free to jump on, when you’re ready. The two occultists I mentioned, namely Emma Hardinge Britten and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, were indeed fiercely anti-Christian. (Is this news to you? Have you studied their writings and their lives? At all?) And to answer your question, the ladies in question were sticking it to the (Christian) man both by _tirelessly attacking “him” in writing and in speech their whole lives through_\*, and by choosing/creating/leading their own, non-Christian spiritual paths through life (Spiritualism and Theosophy, respectively). And that by itself is all _absolutely fucking fine_, if you ask me. (If you were under the impression that I am a Christian, you were dead wrong, man. Dead wrong.) _Howeverrrrrrr_, one of the tactics these ladies used in order to stick it to the (Christian) man was to perpetuate the FALSE idea that Christianity was a perverted, corrupted remnant of an über-ancient ur-religion, the source of all faiths, based either on the sun’s passing through the zodiac or the worship of the phallus or what have you. The problem being that _it has never been proven that there was ever such a thing as an über-ancient ur-religion_ in the first place. So there’s that. \*) Britten: “The ghosts of ancient faiths arise to convict her [Christianity] of audacious plagiarism, and the vanished generations of eighteen centuries return to accuse her of overwhelming the earth with oceans ot blood and tears. She adds nothing to the science of true religion, for she throws no light on the solemn problems of life, death, or Deity. She elucidates no mysteries of nature, explains no causes in harmony with science, no effects that tend to the world’s improvement or instruction, and she would leave the race now, as deeply steeped in sin, sorrow, violence, and wrong, as she found it, eighteen centuries ago.” (Emma Hardinge Britten, _The Faiths, Facts, and Frauds of Religious History_.) ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/52 "2013-03-14T20:42:44Z")
> [@Paranoid\_Randroid](#): > > If I read **Steken** ’s statement correctly, not so much did occultists wish to stick it to the Christian but rather “gentlemen scholars” of the eighteenth century. (Presumably Blavatsky et al. were merely themselves bamboozled.) I admit I’ve never encountered the phrase “gentlemen scholars” with reference to unscrupulously careless mythologists who aim to assemble anti-Christian propaganda, but there you go. Eek, just checked my notes, turns out Godwin uses the term “gentleman amateur”, not “gentleman scholar”, for the cheeky li’l devils in question. They were certainly both unscrupulous and careless, for the most part, but worth studying (if you’re into that sort of thing) for their great impact on later generations of occultists, New Age-types, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Kepler1571](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/db5fbb/32.png) [@Kepler1571](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kepler1571)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/53 "2013-03-15T14:20:28Z")
> [@Steken](#): > > I’m not buying it. I’m not buying the Jung thing, I’m not buying the Campbell thing, I’m not buying the “oooooh archetypes” thing, I’m not buying the “all faiths have basically the same stories you guys” thing, and I’m absolutely not buying the “all faiths have a common core/origin/whatever” thing. No sirreeeeeee, I’m not buying any of it. At all. I’m grumpy and I’m gonna sit here and be grumpy about it and deny it and not buy any of it. So there. > > Now, it wasn’t long before I last recommended this very book on this very forum, but now I’m gonna do it again: _The Theosophical Enlightenment_, by Joscelyn Godwin. Amongst other things, it shows how a bunch of those ideas popped up amongst “gentlemen scholars” during the 18th century, who, playing fast and loose with the historical evidence, came up with the idea that way back in the day, mankind worshipped the sun and its passage through the zodiac, “creating an astronomical religion whose vestiges survive throughout the known world, and which is the origin of all known religions, including Christianity.” > > It was all bullshit and unfounded flights of fancy, but hey, it was a nice, roundabout way of sticking it to the (Christian) man, and so the idea spread – early occultists such as Britten, Blavatsky etc. digged it, took it up, and switched out a few details in the process (for example, adding or subtracting phallus-worship to the mix, depending on one’s sensibility). > > Over the next hundred years or so, increased specialization proved the grand theories of the “gentlemen scholars” wrong, and soon enough, “the only people who persisted with universal theories were the occultists or esotericists.” Uh, yeah, until Jung and Campbell and the Esalen crowd and, it seems, this Cashford character as well. There’s a big gap between Campbell (who had anthropological empirical data), Jung (who had case studies), and Madame Blavatsky and Her Merry Band of Cranks. And in any case, diverting attention to the more ephemeral and mystical fringe elements doesn’t speak to the hard factual record that religions, like any human cultural creation, borrow freely from one another as they evolve to meet the needs of local communities. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/54 "2013-03-15T14:30:12Z")
> [@Kepler1571](#): > > the hard factual record that religions, like any human cultural creation, borrow freely from one another as they evolve to meet the needs of local communities. Yes, but they need to be in contact for this exchange to happen. Often religions/cultures are seperated by too big a rifts in distance and/or time to be able to influence each other. ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/55 "2013-03-15T14:50:53Z")
> [@Kepler1571](#): > > There’s a big gap between Campbell (who had anthropological empirical data), Jung (who had case studies), and Madame Blavatsky and Her Merry Band of Cranks. > > And in any case, diverting attention to the more ephemeral and mystical fringe elements doesn’t speak to the hard factual record that religions, like any human cultural creation, borrow freely from one another as they evolve to meet the needs of local communities. Sure Campbell had anthropological empirical data, and sure Jung had case studies. But the conclusions they drew based on that data and those case studies do not always stand up to scrutiny, any more than Blavatsky’s books do. As for the idea that “religions, like any human cultural creation, borrow freely from one another as they evolve to meet the needs of local communities”, I absolutely agree with you. But both Jung, Campbell and Blavatsky claimed a _lot_ more than that. Jung, for example, imagined an “unbroken historical continuity” between the Gnostics and the alchemists – both, he claimed, sought “the inner sun”. The problem being that the idea of an “inner sun” _does not appear in even a single Gnostic text_! But hey, Jung was so enamored with the idea of connecting every spiritual tradition, ever, to every other spiritual tradition, ever, that he wouldn’t let a pesky little historical fact like that cramp his style. One should also keep in mind that every time one religious tradition “borrows freely” from another, the borrowed material tends to be so heavily re-interpreted in the process that at the end of it all, it is hardly recognizable. For this reason, the best scholars tend to be those who, _contra_ Jung, Campbell, Blavatsky et. al., are careful to point out the enormous _differences_ between different religious traditions, rather than go bananas over some imagined common core. ---
**Author:** ![Kepler1571](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/db5fbb/32.png) [@Kepler1571](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kepler1571)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/56 "2013-03-15T14:56:35Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > Yes, but they need to be in contact for this exchange to happen. > Often religions/cultures are seperated by too big a rifts in distance and/or time to be able to influence each other. Sure, but there are also common circumstances that pre-modern societies face. Water gives life, rain comes from the sky, ergo, God lives in the sky. Uncle Og was walking around until yesterday, then he stopped moving and started getting ripe, ergo, Og has a soul that departed the body after death (it probably went to the sky to live with God). ---
**Author:** ![Kepler1571](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/db5fbb/32.png) [@Kepler1571](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kepler1571)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/57 "2013-03-15T14:58:47Z")
> [@Steken](#): > > Sure Campbell had anthropological empirical data, and sure Jung had case studies. But the conclusions they drew based on that data and those case studies do not always stand up to scrutiny, any more than Blavatsky’s books do. > > As for the idea that “religions, like any human cultural creation, borrow freely from one another as they evolve to meet the needs of local communities”, I absolutely agree with you. But both Jung, Campbell and Blavatsky claimed a _lot_ more than that. > > Jung, for example, imagined an “unbroken historical continuity” between the Gnostics and the alchemists – both, he claimed, sought “the inner sun”. The problem being that the idea of an “inner sun” _does not appear in even a single Gnostic text_! > > But hey, Jung was so enamored with the idea of connecting every spiritual tradition, ever, to every other spiritual tradition, ever, that he wouldn’t let a pesky little historical fact like that cramp his style. > > One should also keep in mind that every time one religious tradition “borrows freely” from another, the borrowed material tends to be so heavily re-interpreted in the process that at the end of it all, it is hardly recognizable. For this reason, the best scholars tend to be those who, _contra_ Jung, Campbell, Blavatsky et. al., are careful to point out the enormous _differences_ between different religious traditions, rather than go bananas over some imagined common core. I agree with all of this. Also, as much as I really respect Jung, he lost me with “synchronicity.” That gets my vote for dumbest thing a smart person ever believed in. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/58 "2013-03-15T17:35:32Z")
> [@Kepler1571](#): > > Sure, but there are also common circumstances that pre-modern societies face. Water gives life, rain comes from the sky, ergo, God lives in the sky. Uncle Og was walking around until yesterday, then he stopped moving and started getting ripe, ergo, Og has a soul that departed the body after death (it probably went to the sky to live with God). No. ‘rain comes from the sky’, ergo, **a** god lives in the sky. ‘Water gives life’, ergo **a** god lives in this spring, river, pool etc This pulls the legs from under your step 2; ‘has a soul that departed the body after death (it probably went to the sky to live with God)’. Living in the sky with god is absolutely not universal. ---
**Author:** ![Kepler1571](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/db5fbb/32.png) [@Kepler1571](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kepler1571)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/59 "2013-03-15T17:49:55Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > No. > > ‘rain comes from the sky’, ergo, **a** god lives in the sky. > ‘Water gives life’, ergo **a** god lives in this spring, river, pool etc Sure, that’s how it starts. But then you start abstracting. What is it we mean when we say there is a spirit in the pond giving water or in the air giving rain? “Spiritness” has to be non-corporeal because we can’t see it. That suggests strongly that it is related to Uncle Og’s soul. Now if you’re a Platonist you get really fancy taking \*form \*from matter and calling it the first principle. But most of us aren’t that clever, and we stop at a more or less anthropomorphized God. Theology develops like physics. At first, if I throw a rock at you it has an impact, and if you fall off the cliff wall it has an impact. Eventually we abstract the idea of “force” from all these individual cases – the rock doesn’t have “impact” in it, but impact is the noun behind all the impact verbs. In the same way, “God” came from all the little god-like verbing we used to populate the enchanted world with. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826/60 "2013-03-15T18:54:15Z")
> [@Kepler1571](#): > > Sure, that’s how it starts. But then **you** start abstracting. What is it we mean when **we** say there is a spirit in the pond giving water or in the air giving rain? “Spiritness” has to be non-corporeal because we can’t see it. That suggests strongly that it is related to Uncle Og’s soul. Now if **you** ’re a Platonist you get really fancy taking \*form \*from matter and calling it the first principle. But most of **us** aren’t that clever, and we stop at a more or less anthropomorphized God. Who is this ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘us’? We are talking about supposed communalities underlying all religions. You are projecting backwards. You are Looking at modern Christianity and noting things that have persisted through the ages and properties of the end-product. Calling\* those\* ‘underlying principles’ is totally a-historic. Yes, the process from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism to atheism seems logical and linear but that doesn’t mean it always has to go that way. It is like thinking democracy is something every culture will ultimately arrive at. Or that the ‘progress’ from hunter-gathering to farming to mercantilism to industrial to social etc is some kind of law that will befall any human society. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whence-religion/652826.md?page=4)