Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 484595" data-attributes="member: 7240">Our modern idea of proof versus faith is a very recent debate. Whether God really existed wasn't really under debate until the 18th century. Everyone took the existence of the divine  for granted. The supernatural wasn't the main point of the religion anyway; and in some theories of Christianity, the Pope is in fact the third person of the trinity. In Japan, the emperor if God; doing magic, etc isn't really the central point of dealing with the divine. God-emperor type figures on earth also have the capacity for direct communication with their followers; is there any less diversity and heresy within Shintoism, Mormonism or Roman Catholicism? Not really. As for contradiction, it's handled in a different way in religions that have survived the advent of philosophy and logic; European polytheism would never develop something like the Nicene Creed, Chalcedonian Creed, etc to address these things because they wouldn't even be received as contradictions in the way we understand them and would not even be viewed as problematic. Well, Norse mythology is not the only primitive myth system I've looked at. I've seen dozens of aboriginal North American myth systems and they share this trait of containing things that our understanding of logic would see as contradictory but which their system of thought does not. Also, I don't see how the Utgaard-Loki story is a conflation of two stories -- it's one story. But even if you were able to successfully represent it as some kind of editing error, it doesn't alter the fact that many polytheistic myths involve this kind of thing. You can even go up to medieval Christian thought to see that our modern conception of contradiction is often not shared by societies that are significantly different from ours. There is no question that the way people in ours and other Western societies think is different from the way many cultures before us thought. Not better. Different; one of the ways we can measure this is the emphasis of the both-and dialectic over the either-or dialectic.Finally, my point is that if you read sociology, anthropology or critical theory of history, you will see that there is a virtual academic consensus that one of the features of an oral tradition culture is a different relationship to what we see as contradiction.</blockquote>

Verification