a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by MattholomewCup
MattholomewCup  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: More Young People Are Moving Away From Religion, But Why?

    Religion on the other hand, is always up to interpretation. What does the story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of good and evil about?

That's true now, yes. Religion has gotten very feel-good in that way. When it was written though, it, too, was supposed to be definitive answers (And for a lot of matters remains so). There's no misinterpreting the 10 commandments for example, seeing how around half of them are about worshipping one true God and that all other gods are false. It was written by men who lived in a scary world that seemed to make no sense, which lacked any inherent justice, and for which there was no explanation of our presence. So they attributed it to God and wrote the stories He allegedly told them. Adam and Eve was supposed to be a literal story explaining humans - a myth. The story of Job is a myth to explain why bad things happen to seemingly good people, and the tower of Babel is a myth to explain languages. They are also moralistic stories as well, and incidentally over time we have shed the mythic nature of them because we have pretty good explanations of a lot of what the stories tried to explain. But we retained the moral explanations behind them, and reinterpreted them to fit our modern world.

Although, that may also just be what I make if it, and if it's what you find solace in then you have to follow your interpretation. I would like to at least play devil's advocate and suggest that most people do put a lot of effort to figure out what philosophy and existence mean to them. There's more to think about than just religion, and people can find the answers to their life questions not from the likes of Jesus, Mohammed, or Buddha but also from Confucius, Socrates, Immanuel Kant, and Bertrand Russell.





BLOB_CASTLE  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Although, that may also just be what I make if it
I would agree with you in that your explanation above is simply how you individually view it. However I do agree with you that They are all moralistic stories. Regardless of if these stories happened or not, they speak what I believe to be truth as to how we are meant to live. And that's all that really matters. And you're right. A person could get all their answers from great philosophers. I'm not trying to put one over the other in this regard. Where I think religion though has a benefit it that if I'm not mistaken, all of them take into account the afterlife. But that's an entirely different discussion.