On Sat, 12 Feb 2000 08:11:08 +0000 glenn morton <mortongr@flash.net>
writes:
> ( in response to ) dfsiemensjr@juno.com wrote:
>
> All I am saying is that Bridges, who lived with these people all his
> life,
> was initiated into their secret societies, and who should know of
> their
> religious propensities, disdained the entire concept that they were
> religious. You can, of course, reject his eyewitness account, but
> upon what
> basis? Your preconception and refusal to believe Bridges? Bridges,
> being
> the son of a missionary should have had a predisposition to believe
> what
> you do about them, yet he didn't. What data do you have that shows
> the Ona
> were religious at that time? Your preconception is not
> observational
> evidence.
>
> I have to go back to something you said in your last note:
>
> >Your atheistic boss rather obviously held himself as the highest
> >possible entity. Where a Christian expresses his dependence on God
> (we
> >call it prayer whether personal or corporate), he acted out his
> personal
> >or racial adequacy.
>
> Believing oneself independent of God does not make for a religious
> life. My
> boss did not worship himself.
>
> glenn
>
Please, Glenn, don't twist my words. I made no challenge to Bridges'
observations. Indeed, his comments on the people who came through and
"described" the Ona rings a bell with me. Many years back, an "authority"
on missions came through the station where my folks were working. His
trip was presented to the constituents in the States as a fact-finding
mission. But he asked nothing from the people on the ground. Instead, he
spent the entire time telling them how things were. When he published his
results, they did not approximate reality, either in connection with what
my folks knew first hand, nor in what their fellow missionaries reported.
Note that what I have done is challenge his and your definition of
"religion." Both of you hold that it cannot be religion without some sort
of ritual or worship. However, the individual whose god is money does not
build an altar surmounted by a dollar sign on which he can place candles
and to which he can direct his prayer. The same is true of the worship of
self. The person whose god is himself does not hire a priest to conduct
services.
George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com on Sat, 12 Feb 2000 08:04:07 -0500 wrote:
> Whether or not the object of one's trust is "a fellow being" or not
isn't really the issue. Cf. Luther's Large Catechism on the 1st
Commandment:
> "What does it mean to have a god? Or what is God? Answer: A god
means that
from which we are to expect all good and to which we are to take refuge
in all distress,
so that to have a God is is nothing else than to trust and believe Him
from the heart;
as I have often said that the confidence and faith of the heart alone
make both God and
an idol. ... _That now, I say, upon which you set your heart and put
your trust is
properly your god_." [Emphasis added. Note - the difference in
capitalization of God
and god doesn't exist in the German in which all nouns are capitalized.]
This comes closer in describing the object of worship (with or without a
ritual), but I would qualify "that from which we are to expect all good."
I recall a report of a tribe in Africa who engaged in rituals to placate
Shaitan (if my memory serves me). When the missionaries asked if there
were not a higher God, the response was that they knew of the Supreme
Being, but he was good and would not visit evil on them. They were afraid
of Shaitan and tried to placate him. I believe that it is proper to say
that Shaitan (/shah-ee TAN/) was their god at least as much as the high
God. The "spirits" of woods and springs were gods in the folk religion of
ancient Greece as surely as the Olympians, though the former did not have
temples dedicated to them.
If one insists that "religion" be defined in terms of a public cult with
temples and rituals, then the Ona and atheists have no religion. But if
one recognizes that a god is anything which is the primary source of good
and authority, with or without ritual, then atheism, humanism and the
avoidance practices of the Ona qualify as religions. Anthropologists, who
adhere to their version of "objective evidence," demand a checklist of
observable activitiies. Philosophers and theologians go beyond the
superficial marks to the deeper function. This clearly has priority, for
anthropology as a science does not extend back beyond the middle of the
19th century. During the 17th and 18th centuries, anthropology was more
likely to refer to human anatomy, though the soul might have been
included.
There is a kind of parallel here with the attempt, some time back, to
produce an objective measure of greatness for poetry. The acknowledged
masterpieces were ananyzed and a formula was devised to compute an index.
The index was successful in ranking hack work low. But it consistently
ranked mediocre poems above the great ones. Unfortunately, objective
measures have a way of missing the relevant when what is essentially
human is involved.
Dave
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