Re: Senators from Utah being Southern

Religions are essentially collections of stories about the latter method of modeling, created for people who can't do the math,
20 years ago, I might have agreed with this assessment. Actually, written in the present tense it is largely true. 3,000 years ago is a different story, however, and modern religionists often forget that. The earliest religious texts (including the Torah) are written in such a 'primitive' time that I don't think any of the modern notions apply. For instance, in the Torah it would seem that there are clearly plenty of other Gods to choose from, but the one the jews were commanded to choose was (Tetragrammaton). He doesn't even seem to have the qualities of "justice" righteousness, truth, peace, compassion blah blah blah that we are supposed to associate with God today. In fact, the Torah was written in the form of a peace treaty, with the implication that if the jews stopped obeying their end of the bargain, they'd get the CRAP kicked out of them. Period. Likewise, the Vedas and the earliest portions of the I Ching come from a time that is probably incomprehensible now.
A reference to group theory, eh? Nice. The Jungians of the world might argue otherwise, that religion to some extent codified primitive forms of group theory into symbolism. Certainly, the Dzog Chen tibetan Buddhists did comething very close to this, visualizing n-dimensional arrays of 'dieties' which are considered really focal/fold points of "psychocosmic energy"*. If you are referring to modern religion in the religious sense, I agree. But I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater...there are some very odd things tucked away into the Torah, for instance, that are arguably worth discovering. But then again, maybe I'm willing to throw the baby out with the bath water...if that water gets pooped up enough, the baby is no longer visible! -TD *: See "Psychocosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stupa" by Anagarika Govinda for an excellent discussion of buddhist iconography in the context of an architectural study.
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Religions are essentially collections of stories about the latter method
Religions are artificial shortcuts to "knowledge" and excellent method to neutralize congenital human curiosity. If you can't comprehend it, fake it. They all offer explanations of various phenomena by using familiar human memes (fathers, mothers, children, birth, death.) It works most of the time. The major difference between politics and religion is that politics is streamlined, it doesn't count on the internal consistency (and related effort to grasp it) but instead uses (via media) brute force of repetition. It all boils down to getting masses to farm out the inquisitivness and then servicing it. ===== end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com
participants (2)
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Morlock Elloi
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Tyler Durden