these terms, it is almost as though a form of natural selection is at work
with religions, determining what doctrines they accept and promulgate, what
areas they choose to defend (even in the face of facts to the contrary), what
rituals they adopt (whatever brings in the crowd and keeps them there), etc.
Religions are not static, they change and adapt themselves to new and
emerging norms. They have to, otherwise they die out. But because there is
no god guiding this process and ensuring that they stay true to whatever
happened to be the “original” teachings, religions change and develop and a
lot of the terrible baggage they carry (in their capacity as cultural
motivations) could be abandoned by the religious if they understood their
own religion better. Not in the sense of it being “true”, but in the Joseph
Campbell sense of “what is it really for.”
Let’s look at some bad examples of this. Some things that have nothing to
do with a “religion” (being, in the Joseph Campbell sense, an attempt by
developing humans to better understand themselves, their environment and
to structure their social interactions—social interactions which once included
animals, and the respect and camaraderie that humans in hunter gatherer
societies had for them).
Honor Killings
This sad report come out about an Indian couple planning to get married,
but who were brutally killed by the girl’s family (BBC News). This would be
a case of religious murder, except that the couple were from the same caste.
They were just getting married without the family’s permission. The local
community fully supported the horrendous acts of barbarism perpetrated by
the family against them. No voice was raised in opposition.
I suspect that when Hinduism was being developed, there was the desire to
control intermarriage between the invading Aryans (or, more politically
correct, the Ancestral North Indians—although why they are called Indians
when they came from Europe or Central Asia is beyond me; see
Fragmented Society was Once a Melting Pot - Science Mag) and the
native population so the prohibition was incorporated into the religion to
legitimize it and ensure its propagation. Lack of parental approvals can also
get you killed in conservative Muslim and Christian communities in those
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