Comments by "Serai3" (@Serai3) on "Religious Practice Precedes Religious Belief?" video.

  1. +abuhado Sure, but the gist is in the word "Pentecostal". A PROTESTANT influence on Catholics. That stuff did not originate in Catholicism, but in Southern US Protestant sects. Catholic religion always relied very heavily on practice before belief until the late 20th century.
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  2. I define religion as "any system of ideas, beliefs, rituals, rules, and commands that seek to explain the existence and state of the world as the worshipper knows it and guide them through living in it". But you're right - "religion" is a slippery category, and a relatively recent one. Back in, say, Jesus's time, there was no separation between what we would call "religion", "philosophy", "law", "science", and other such matters. They were all part of explaining and maintaining a community's way of life. It's only since the "Enlightenment" that we've come to think of "religion" as a separate category.
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  3. It's also led to a lot of American Christians thinking they can just behave however they want to others so long as they "believe in Jesus". What does that even mean if you ignore everything he ever said about how to be a decent human being?
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  4. +Andrew McAuliffe Of course not. You're thinking in terms of "belief is all", the very Protestant idea that this video is about. The vast majority of religions in world history have had far more emphasis on ritual and community than on what we in the modern era call "belief". There have been religions where such "belief" wasn't even required - so long as you did what the gods wanted, they didn't care what you thought of them. That's a big part of the identity aspect of religion. For instance, the word in the bible that we tend to translate as "abomination" doesn't actually refer to evil. A more accurate translation would be "anathema", i.e., "something we don't do". A huge amount of religious rules are about making clear the difference between the religion's members and the rest of the population. (Thus all those rules in Leviticus about tattoos and beard-cutting and shellfish eating.)
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  5. That difference is very recent. For most of human history, religion and philosophy have not been separate. It's hard to pull oneself out of the modern thinking box, but a lot of our supposedly solid ideas about things like this are neither universal nor historical.
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  6. I think our habit of jamming concepts into a lot of little separate boxes is detrimental to real understanding. Again, it's an "Enlightenment" thing, and much like the idea that the universe is just one big machine, it has not served us well at all.
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  7. Most of that comes from the fact that you're a Protestant, and thus you believe that "faith" is the defining aspect of religion. But that is not at all a universal concept, in fact it's relatively recent. Throughout most of history - including Christian history - the way one lived and behaved was much more important than the actual "belief" one espoused. Even the bible says that works are more important than faith, and it's a pity Christianity ever lost that idea.
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  8. You haven't hung out with many Catholics if you think that.
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