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Post by matt on Oct 14, 2012 21:09:21 GMT 10
I don't put any stock in religion either.
I am not religious, I am simply faithful to the Lord.
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Post by jody on Oct 14, 2012 21:13:27 GMT 10
yep...religion sucks...it is your faith that matters.
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Post by pim on Oct 15, 2012 9:17:33 GMT 10
So ... jody and Matt ... let me get this straight: forget "religion" per se, it's what you yourself subjectively think/believe/hold on to that matters. The rest is bullshit.
Is that it?
Or, put more objectively, individual faith is everything, communial religion is irrelevant.
Because make no mistake about it, embedded within the word "religion" is the notion of the ties that bind believers together. The /-lig-/ element in "religion" is the same /-lig-/ that you get in "ligament" and "ligature", both of which refer to tissue that binds one part of the body to another.
"Faith" is individual, "religion" is communal.
"Faith" is originally from a "Latin" word meaning "trust". And indeed to "trust" someone or something involves a leap of faith. "Creed" which means "belief" is from a Latin verb "credere" which, if you trace it even further back, was a phrase made up of a couple of Latin words meaning "I put my heart to it". I like that one because it goes to the idea of "love".
By the same token the word "believe" is a very old English word without a trace of Latin in it which means the same as "creed" (at least "belief" means the same as "creed") and it has the same origin as the English word "love".
So words like "faith", "creed" and "belief" are all to do with "trust" and :love" and come from the heart. They are beautiful words.
And this is where "religion" comes in. If your faith and your belief are so strong that your heart is full of love for, and trust in, the God that you worship, what do you do when you meet others who share the same faith and belief as you have, and whose hearts are full of the same love and trust as yours is? Don't you worship together? And isn't that act of worship, done communally by people who are of the same mind and heart, a profound experience? And isn't that what "religion" really is?
Forget the bureaucrtatic structures of "formal" Christianity. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is what Jesus says in Matthew 18:20:
Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I
Jesus is talking not just about faith here, but religion.
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Post by pim on Oct 15, 2012 11:01:45 GMT 10
The word Creed and Credit and cerdibility all come from the Latin Credo for "I believe". Yes, and the first two letters (or /cr-/) of credo is a fragment of what had been cor which is the Latin for "heart". Latin was already an ancient language when Christianity first started spreading within the Roman Empire so a word like credo = I believe had a long history and had evolved (yes, evolved!) from an older phrase containing cor and a verb. I've been trying to find the full phrase but haven't been successful. I think I saw it in Melvyn Bragg's superb history of the King James Bible. But "credo" as a Latin verb evolved from an earlier phrase meaning "I give my heart". Which brings me back to my earlier point that "faith" and "belief" are matters of the heart, and religion is the fellowship of people whose hearts are in the same place. |
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Post by slartibartfast on Oct 15, 2012 18:53:18 GMT 10
BHP stock.
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Post by pim on Oct 15, 2012 22:43:29 GMT 10
I read somewhere that he would have been born in 4 BC!! ;D
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Post by pim on Oct 16, 2012 9:25:08 GMT 10
I blame American religious nutcases who insist that the Bible is a reliable and accurate historical record. They're wrong and they're ignorant and their ignorance leads them into obscurantism and voodoo theology. I'd prefer to read the Bible in a way that's more like the way a fellow poet might approach the religious poetry of William Blake, or Milton's Paradise Lost, or the metaphysical poetry of John Donne.
But that's just me ...
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