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Is there anything all religions have in common?
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
All religions gather people
Sore knees (literally or metaphorically).
BruceDLimber
Well-Known Member
In the Baha'i view all the GREAT religions are monotheistic and in fact worship the same One God.
And SW's comment about gathering people is correcct for all true religions.
Peace,
Bruce
And SW's comment about gathering people is correcct for all true religions.
Peace,
Bruce
All I have is the obvious: They believe in things outside of the material world.
Other than that, anything can happen.
Other than that, anything can happen.
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
I was thinking along similar lines, oddly enough.
Religions tend to make delusional thinking acceptable and common place.
Really? I was also picturing Willamena in a short French maid's dress,
while she brandished a wicked looking feather duster. You too?
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Sure. They're all wrong.
Ha!......They all have Gods! Oh... sorry..... a bit obvious....
There are sects of Buddhism without gods, aren't there?
I still appreciate Yi-Fu Tuan's "the impulse for coherence and meaning."
oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
Dunno! I'll take your word for it.
And I just figured that they do not all have devils, either. The Bahair don't have a devil, or recognise evil.... but I'll leave a bahai to confirm that....
I think the gods of many Buddhists are the spirits of dead ancestors. These they worship.
I think you might also find that, as you suggested earlier, there's no real devil in many --- maybe even most -- native American religions. There's usually a trickster figure, such as Coyote or Raven, but any comparison to devils or demons would be superficial, I think.
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Makes a great deal of sense.
Depends on the Buddhist, doesn't it?
I think that any commonality is going to be abstract. They all have an idea of the sacred that is held to be seperate from the mundane, and they try to find meaning in things.
I would agree with the first part -- they all have an idea of sacred and profane. I think Jay's suggest that they all have an impulse to find coherence and meaning is a good one too (as is yours).
Alex_G
Enlightner of the Senses
Well firstly there will be defining and non-defining characteristics for religions. The prior will be things that all religions share but are not present or at least not abundant elsewhere. The latter will be things that all religions have in common, but refer to things also found elsewhere.
There will be a whole host of things that are non defining characteristics that all religions have in common.
Defining characteristics (common yet exclusive to religions) will be far less numerous.
Further to this I doubt that it’s really useful or insightful or even very fruitful to search for some solitary ‘characteristic’ that is present and defining of all religions.
Because religions are heavily integrated in human life, social and cultural circles it is inherently quite complex entity. Rather I think the question is what pattern of characteristics seem to be present across all religions, thus defining them so. So any one characteristic is not in itself exclusively descriptive of religion, but its relative expression in relation to a number of other identifiable characteristics will be unique. This way you can construct a sort of bar code for what is common among all religions.
(High five for unnecessarily complicated replies that dont quite answer the question!
)