Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[GaryLouisSmith]

Well sure, it changes through cultural adaptation but its basic tenets are still recognizable.

No, there is no "it' there to change and there are/were no basic tenets.

Don't know how you figure that, the American colonizers stripped these peoples of their cultural heritage and replaced it with their Christian ideology, and the enslaved peoples adapted these foreign religious ideas to their needs.

The "American colonizers" were backwoods farmers who knew nothing of European Christian ideology. The American frontier was a wild place. You give them way too much historical knowledge. Passions ran deep and broad.

Think differently about what exactly? If you take away all the historical writings about Christ, including all the statements attributed to him, where does that leave you? How do you decide what to accept and what not to?

One simply does phenomenological analysis of the religious act.

[Felix]

The "American colonizers" were backwoods farmers who knew nothing of European Christian ideology. The American frontier was a wild place. You give them way too much historical knowledge.

You implied that the black slaves did not receive their knowledge of Christianity from the American settlers, you said "the American religion must trace its roots to Africa." What does that mean?

One simply does phenomenological analysis of the religious act.

I don't know what that means, can you be more vague?

[GaryLouisSmith]

The "American colonizers" were backwoods farmers who knew nothing of European Christian ideology. The American frontier was a wild place. You give them way too much historical knowledge.

You implied that the black slaves did not receive their knowledge of Christianity from the American settlers, you said "the American religion must trace its roots to Africa." What does that mean?

One simply does phenomenological analysis of the religious act.

I don't know what that means, can you be more vague?

Here is an excerpt from Harold Bloom's excellent book on The American Religion.


What this book terms the American Religion will not end until the nation ends, and yet did not come into full existence for nearly a generation after the nation began. I remember, in the summer of 1969, brooding on the Woodstock rock festival, and finding in it many of the stigmata of the great camp meetings of American revival tradition. The first Woodstock, and the most extraordinary camp meeting ever, took place at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, starting on August 6, 1801, and going on for a week afterwards. Perhaps as many as twenty-five thousand people experienced the ecstasies of Cane Ridge, a number more than comparable to the Woodstock throngs of half a million, given the enormous difference in population across a century and two-thirds.
The backwoodsmen and their families, like the young Americans at Woodstock, underwent the singular experience of blending into an Orphic unison, in which denominational differences dissolved. Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists at once became American Religionists, rapt by ecstasy. Barton Stone, then a Presbyterian minister, came out of Cane Ridge as an incipient Restorationist, searching again for the primitive Church. His quest was to lead, in time, to the formation of such denominations as the Disciples of Christ and the Churches of Christ, and so his legacy is with us still. Yet Stone preached at Cane Ridge not as a prophet of future denominations, nor as a conscious founder of the American Religion, but primarily as a fugitive from Calvinism. In his memoirs, he prefaces his account of Cane Ridge with a fierce denunciation of Calvinism:
Calvinism is among the heaviest clogs on Christianity in the world. It is a dark mountain between heaven and earth, and is amongst the most discouraging hindrances to sinners from seeking the kingdom of God, and engenders bondage and gloominess to the saints. Its influence is felt throughout the Christian world, even where it is least suspected. Its first link is total depravity. Yet are there thousands of precious saints in this system. (Voices from Cane Ridge, ed. Rhodes Thompson [1954], p. 63)
To save those saints, the Maryland-born Stone came into Kentucky in the spring of 1801, drawn by the religious excitement of a New Birth ministered to by James McGready and other Presbyterian preachers abandoning Calvinism. Stone describes the first camp meeting at which he assisted with a full sense of the uncanny breaking forth:

There, on the edge of a prairie in Logan county, Kentucky, the multitudes came together, and continued a number of days and nights encamped on the ground; during which time worship was carried on in some part of the encampment. The scene to me was new and passing strange. It baffled description. Many, very many fell down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state—sometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan, or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered. After lying thus for hours, they obtained deliverance. The gloomy cloud, which had covered their faces, seemed gradually and visibly to disappear, and hope in smiles brightened into joy—they would rise shouting deliverance. (pp. 64-65)
At Cane Ridge in August, the climactic camp meeting occurred, with Methodist and Baptist preachers joining Stone and the other soon-to-be-ex-Presbyterians: “We all engaged in singing the same songs of praise—all united in prayer—all preached the same things—free salvation urged upon all by faith and repentance.” No one present had ever seen so many people in one place before, since a crowd of about twenty-five thousand would be radically startling to Kentuckians, being more than twelve times as numerous as their largest city at that time. Particularly since so many of these were frontier people, living in relative isolation, the effect had to be a unique experience for them. Sydney Ahlstrom reminded us that these were rough people, profane, heavy drinkers, violent, and that they had never attended night meetings before. Conversions and lovemaking intermingled, while Stone memorably recorded a major outbreak of Enthusiasm, with all its strenuous peculiarities:
The bodily agitations or exercises, attending the excitement in the beginning of this century, were various, and called by various names;— as, the falling exercise—the jerks—the dancing exercise—the barking exercise—the laughing and singing exercise, &c.—The falling exercise was very common among all classes, the saints and sinners of every age and of every grade, from the philosopher to the clown. The subject of this exercise would, generally, with a piercing scream, fall like a log on the floor, earth, or mud, and appear as dead. . . .
The jerks cannot be so easily described. Sometimes the subject of the jerks would be affected in some one member of the body, and sometimes in the whole system. When the head alone was affected, it would be jerked backward and forward, or from side to side, so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. When the whole system was affected, I have seen the person stand in one place, and jerk backward and forward in quick succession, their head nearly touching the floor behind and before. All classes, saints and sinners, the strong as well as the weak, were thus affected. I have inquired of those thus affected. They could not account for it; but some have told me that those were among the happiest seasons of their lives. I have seen some wicked persons thus affected, and all the time cursing the jerks, while they were thrown to the earth with violence. Though so awful to behold, I do not remember that any one of the thousands I have seen ever sustained an injury in body. This was as strange as the exercise itself.
The dancing exercise. This generally began with the jerks, and was peculiar to professors of religion. The subject, after jerking awhile, began to dance, and then the jerks would cease. Such dancing was indeed heavenly to the spectators; there was nothing in it like levity, nor calculated to excite levity in the beholders. The smile of heaven shone on the countenance of the subject, and assimilated to angels appeared the whole person. Sometimes the motion was quick and sometimes slow. Thus they continued to move forward and backward in the same track or alley till nature seemed exhausted, and they would fall prostrate on the floor or earth, unless caught by those standing by. While thus exercised, I have heard their solemn praises and prayers ascending to God.
The barking exercise, (as opposers contemptuously called it,) was nothing but the jerks. A person affected with the jerks, especially in his head, would often make a grunt, or bark, if you please, from the suddenness of the jerk. This name of barking seems to have had its origin from an old Presbyterian preacher of East Tennessee.

He had gone into the woods for private devotion, and was seized with the jerks. Standing near a sapling, he caught hold of it, to prevent his falling, and as his head jerked back, he uttered a grunt or kind of noise similar to a bark, his face being turned upwards. Some wag discovered him in this position, and reported that he found him barking up a tree.
The laughing exercise was frequent, confined solely with the religious. It was a loud, hearty laughter, but one sui generic; it excited laughter in none else. The subject appeared rapturously solemn, and his laughter excited solemnity in saints and sinners. It is truly indescribable.
The running exercise was nothing more than, that persons feeling something of these bodily agitations, through fear, attempted to run away, and thus escape from them; but it commonly happened that they ran not far, before they fell, or became so greatly agitated that they could proceed no farther. . . .
I shall close this chapter with the singing exercise. This is more unaccountable than any thing else I ever saw. The subject in a very happy state of mind would sing most melodiously, not from the mouth or nose, but entirely in the breast, the sounds issuing thence. Such music silenced every thing, and attracted the attention of all. It was most heavenly. None could ever be tired of hearing it. Doctor J. P. Campbell and myself were together at a meeting, and were attending to a pious lady thus exercised, and concluded it to be something surpassing any thing we had known in nature.
I cite this only partly for the fun of it; Barton Stone clearly was persuaded of the sincerity and authenticity of these seizures, and they retain a grotesque power. More substantively, they carry us all the way back to the more exuberant of Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasts: the Montanists of ancient Phrygia; the Ranters and many early Quakers; the French Camisards at the turn into the eighteenth century; the convulsionaries of Saint-Medard in the early 1730s who embarrassed the Jansenists; the Moravians, only a few years later; the Wesleyan outbursts of the eighteenth century; the Shakers and Irvingites in the nineteenth, whose outbursts go on well after Cane Ridge. What Stone so soberly describes is endemic in the history of Enthusiasm, and is featured in Pentecostal and other revivals down to this moment. Knox, regarding the Saint-Medard convulsions with Roman Catholic-Oxonian disdain, quite accurately identifies the sadomasochistic sexuality strongly present in these phenomena. However you cleanse or dress up Revivalism, the outbursts of Enthusiasm truly are their norm and not their aberration. There was something frightening as well as grotesque in the Cane Ridge peculiarities, and one sees why the Presbyterian Church turned against Cane Ridge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9zDLqTMFOM

[Belindi]

That's like saying, "I am a thief but I never steal anything." If you only worship one god, you are a monotheist.

What do you call someone who believes many gods exist, but only worships one?

Please note 'worship' is cognate with 'worthship'. By "worship" do you mean you trust in the one supreme god?

Do you mean you believe the one supreme god exists independently of minds?

Do you mean you do certain rituals connected with the one supreme god?

Do you mean you believe the one supreme god can and does intervene in history?

Do you mean the one supreme god incarnated in history?

The traditional religion of the Mende includes belief in a supreme creator god, ancestral spirits, and nature deities. Diviners are consulted in times of illness or ominous experience, and the Mende believe in the power of witches. Many Mende are now Muslims or Christians, however.
Britannica

Is something like what you say your personal religious attitude is, except for the ancestor worship. Nature spirits are real for the traditional Mende man, and their reality detracts nothing from the status of the supreme creator god.

Judeo Christianity and Islam together hold that there is only one deity.No ancestor deities, no nature spirits.

The Eastern religions , Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism don't have any supreme deity.The Eastern religions are concerned not with metaphysics but with politics and morality. Many moral and political tenets from Eastern religions are not alien to the more liberal Judeo Christian and Islamic religious sects, and also chime with Humanism.

I see no reason a man can't take the metaphysical stance of a theist, and at the same time worthship a nature spirit such as The Boy.

[GaryLouisSmith]

The "American colonizers" were backwoods farmers who knew nothing of European Christian ideology. The American frontier was a wild place. You give them way too much historical knowledge.

You implied that the black slaves did not receive their knowledge of Christianity from the American settlers, you said "the American religion must trace its roots to Africa." What does that mean?

One simply does phenomenological analysis of the religious act.

I don't know what that means, can you be more vague?

Ok, I’m back from my sojourn into the bowels of the city. I will continue with my explanation of The American Religion. It’s time to consider the black church. I have said that the roots of the American Religion are in Africa. Here’s what that means. Black people remembered the shamanism from home. Shamanism is much the same the world over. A person begins to rhythmically move. He or she starts up a repetitive chant. Drums and bells and horns keep time. And built in intensity. Soon the shaman begins to tremble and quake. He enters the land of the spirits. He communicates with the inhabitants of that other world. He may have a task such as finding out what spirit is afflicting some earthly person and then trying to convince that spirit to free the person. Whatever the case, the shaman in his trembling walks and talks with spirits.

Today, that’s what the American Religion is. The person, in repetitive prayer, in ecstatic trembling goes to the spirit world and walks and talks with Jesus. That is the essence of the American Religion.

From the shamans of Africa to the black churches to Rock-n-roll music to the population at large. It is a wild, ecstatic ride. You and your friend Jesus ride the waves. Together. Always carrying on a conversation. Always uttering sweet talk. Always trembling. That is worship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dC0DseCyYE

[GaryLouisSmith]

What do you call someone who believes many gods exist, but only worships one?

Please note 'worship' is cognate with 'worthship'. By "worship" do you mean you trust in the one supreme god?

Do you mean you believe the one supreme god exists independently of minds?

Do you mean you do certain rituals connected with the one supreme god?

Do you mean you believe the one supreme god can and does intervene in history?

Do you mean the one supreme god incarnated in history?

The traditional religion of the Mende includes belief in a supreme creator god, ancestral spirits, and nature deities. Diviners are consulted in times of illness or ominous experience, and the Mende believe in the power of witches. Many Mende are now Muslims or Christians, however.
Britannica

Is something like what you say your personal religious attitude is, except for the ancestor worship. Nature spirits are real for the traditional Mende man, and their reality detracts nothing from the status of the supreme creator god.

Judeo Christianity and Islam together hold that there is only one deity.No ancestor deities, no nature spirits.

The Eastern religions , Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism don't have any supreme deity.The Eastern religions are concerned not with metaphysics but with politics and morality. Many moral and political tenets from Eastern religions are not alien to the more liberal Judeo Christian and Islamic religious sects, and also chime with Humanism.

I see no reason a man can't take the metaphysical stance of a theist, and at the same time worthship a nature spirit such as The Boy.

I sent this to Felix about as a continuation of what I wrote earlier.

Ok, I’m back from my sojourn into the bowels of the city. I will continue with my explanation of The American Religion. It’s time to consider the black church. I have said that the roots of the American Religion are in Africa. Here’s what that means. Black people remembered the shamanism from home. Shamanism is much the same the world over. A person begins to rhythmically move. He or she starts up a repetitive chant. Drums and bells and horns keep time. And build in intensity. Soon the shaman begins to tremble and quake. He enters the land of the spirits. He communicates with the inhabitants of that other world. He may have a task such as finding out what spirit is afflicting some earthly person and then trying to convince that spirit to free the person. Whatever the case, the shaman in his trembling walks and talks with spirits.

Today, that’s what the American Religion is. The person, in repetitive prayer, in ecstatic trembling goes to the spirit world and walks and talks with Jesus. That is the essence of the American Religion.

From the shamans of Africa to the black churches to Rock-n-roll music to the population at large. It is a wild, ecstatic ride. You and your friend Jesus ride the waves. Together. Always carrying on a conversation. Always uttering sweet talk. Always trembling. That is worship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dC0DseCyYE


The Boy is not a nature spirit. Nature spirits are all female. As for Eastern Religions, Hinduism and Buddhism here in the East DO have a Supreme Deity. And they DO have great metaphysical systems. I don't know where you get your information, but wherever you got it, it ain't right. As for Christianity, Judaism and Islam, they do have very extensive levels of angels. I can't see any difference between an angel and a god. Also Jesus speaks of gods. Again your information is cracked.

[Belindi]

GaryLouisSmith wrote:

Again your information is cracked.

Quite possibly. However I am satisfied to use your ramblings as I use dada as a random selection of unrelated notions. These, after the manner of the I Ching and other divination systems, offer me possibilities of constructive narratives.

[GaryLouisSmith]

GaryLouisSmith wrote:

Again your information is cracked.

Quite possibly. However I am satisfied to use your ramblings as I use dada as a random selection of unrelated notions. These, after the manner of the I Ching and other divination systems, offer me possibilities of constructive narratives.

Maybe you finally understand what I am up to. Happy divining

[Belindi]

Divination and theism are not mutually exclusive, except for more rule-bound Christians. Divination is intuitive interpretation.

Gary , you might learn more about 1.syncretic religions and 2. Animism and nature spirits.

[Felix]

Belindi: The Eastern religions , Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism don't have any supreme deity.

Hinduism has what could be called a hierarchy of dieties, the Supreme or Universal God/Self is known as Brahman. He is both manifest and unmanifest, Being and Non-Being, Existence (sat) and non-existence (asat). But most people have trouble worshipping formlessness, thus we have the pantheon of minor dieties which represent various aspects of Brahman.

Gary, I am not familiar enough with Christian history to say if the shamanic approach to worship you described existed in the European Christian community prior to it's arrival in the Americas.

[Sculptor1]

The Eastern religions , Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism don't have any supreme deity.

I think it is fair to say that of Buddhism, but Confucianism is more like a "philosophy", or even a method of governance than "religion", and is not so concerned with cosmologies and how to keep account of the grain, whilst avoiding stress.

Hinduism is a dustbin category mostly invented for the convenience of imperialists such as Christians (and Muslims) to lump together a loose association of polytheistic beliefs, in such as way as to be able to count the "Hindoos", and make a distinction between them and "Muslims". But for each belief the particular god of choice tends to be the big guy.

[Sy Borg]

Hinduism had three big guys, the creator, the maintainer and the renewer.

[GaryLouisSmith]

Hinduism had three big guys, the creator, the maintainer and the renewer.

Yes, three big guys, but beyond them their creator is Mahadevi, the Great Goddess, primarily known as Kali. It is Kali that created both the gods and the material world. Here is a dropbox link to a pdf of David Kinsley's Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine - https://www.dropbox.com/s/urfk7bz0cu9ff ... s.pdf?dl=0 .

Here in Kathmandu there are many temples to Kali and they are well attended by devotees.

What you are dealing with here is a political problem. Tantra is that part of Hinduism that scandalized those British colonizers. Back then and even today, any upper class Hindu who wants to get along well with and get a good job from Westerners must deny that Tantra is a real part of "good" Hinduism. He will say that it is just village superstition, not rational and scientific like the male gods of elite Hinduism.

Here's an excerpt from that book.

The Black Goddess
She is the terrible one who has a dreadful face. She should be meditated
upon as having disheveled hair and a garland of freshly cut human heads.
She has four arms. In her upper left hand she holds a sword that has just
been bloodied by the severed head that she holds in her lower left hand.
Her upper right hand makes the gesture of assurance and her lower right
hand, the sign of granting favors. She has a bluish complexion and is lustrous
like a dark cloud. She is completely naked, and her body gleams with
blood that is smeared all over it from the garland of bleeding severed heads
around her neck. Her ear ornaments are the corpses of children. Her fangs
are dreadful, and her face is fierce. Her breasts are large and round, and
she wears a girdle made of severed human hands. Blood trickles from the
corners of her mouth and makes her face gleam. She makes a terrible sound
and lives in the cremation ground, where she is surrounded by howling
jackals. She stands on the chest of Siva in the form of a corpse. She is eager
to have sexual intercourse in reverse fashion with Mahakala. She wears
a satisfied expression. She smiles.1
She is lustrous like a dark cloud and wears black clothes. Her tongue lolls,
her face is dreadful to behold, her eyes are sunken, and she smiles. She
wears the crescent moon on her forehead and is decorated with serpents.
She drinks wine, has a serpent as a sacred thread, is seated on a bed of
snakes, and wears a garland of fifty human heads that hangs all the way
down to her knees. She has a large belly, and the thousand-hooded serpent
Ananta looms above her head. Siva is present as a boy beside her.
She makes a loud, laughing sound, is very dreadful, but bestows the desires
of the aspirant.-
68 KALI
She is like a mountain of collyrium, and her abode is in the cremation
ground. She has three red eyes, her hair is disheveled, and she is awful to
look at because of her emaciated body. In her left hand she holds a jar full
of liquor mixed with meat, and in her right hand she holds a freshly severed
head. She is eating raw flesh, she is naked, her limbs are adorned with
ornaments, she is drunk on wine, and she smiles.'

Although the order, number, and names of the Mahavidyas may vary, Kali
is always included and is usually named or shown first. She is also affirmed
in many places to be the most important of the Mahavidyas, the primordial
or primary Mahavidya, the ^/Mahavidya.4 In some cases it seems
apparent that the other Mahavidyas originate from Kali or are her differing
forms. In one of the accounts of the origin of the Mahavidyas as
a group, it is explicitly stated that they arise from Kali when Siva wishes
to leave her.5 In the origin account given in the Mahdbhdgavata-purdna,
Sati takes on the form of a goddess who resembles Kali before actually
multiplying herself into the ten Mahavidyas. Although Kali is not specifically
named, Sati first turns into a dark, frightening, naked, four-armed
goddess with disheveled hair and a garland of skulls (which is just how
Kali is usually described), and then creates from herself the other forms.6
Furthermore, in early accounts of Sati's confrontation with Siva over her
right to attend her father's sacrifice—accounts in which the Mahavidyas
do not appear—Sati does turn herself into Kali and in her Kali form convinces
Siva to let her go.7 The Saktisamgama-tantra proclaims Kali's priority
explicitly: " A l l the deities, including the Mahavidyas, Siddhi-vidyas,
Vidyas, and Upa-vidyas, are different forms that Kali assumes."8
Kali's place as the primary Mahavidya, the first among the goddesses,
is reinforced by the fact that she lends the group as a whole her own characteristics.
Her character, attributes, and nature are shared by the others.
She is typical, perhaps even paradigmatic, as the ddi Mahavidya. And
her symbolic meaning, I think, often helps to uncover the meaning of
some of the other goddesses in the group. As we shall see below, according
to some interpretations Kali reveals or symbolizes the ultimate goal suggested
or implied in the other Mahavidyas. She completes the others, as
it were.

[GaryLouisSmith]

Belindi: The Eastern religions , Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism don't have any supreme deity.

Hinduism has what could be called a hierarchy of dieties, the Supreme or Universal God/Self is known as Brahman. He is both manifest and unmanifest, Being and Non-Being, Existence (sat) and non-existence (asat). But most people have trouble worshipping formlessness, thus we have the pantheon of minor dieties which represent various aspects of Brahman.

Yes, Hinduism has a hierarchy of deities, though that hierarchy keeps transmogrifying and inverting and turning inside out. It's like a torus strip. In Tantra, the most popular form of Hinduism here in Nepal and Northeast India, it is Kali that is beyond even Brahman. See what I wrote to Greta below.

[GaryLouisSmith]

The Eastern religions , Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism don't have any supreme deity.

I think it is fair to say that of Buddhism, but Confucianism is more like a "philosophy", or even a method of governance than "religion", and is not so concerned with cosmologies and how to keep account of the grain, whilst avoiding stress.

Hinduism is a dustbin category mostly invented for the convenience of imperialists such as Christians (and Muslims) to lump together a loose association of polytheistic beliefs, in such as way as to be able to count the "Hindoos", and make a distinction between them and "Muslims". But for each belief the particular god of choice tends to be the big guy.

Buddhism in the East and Buddhism in the West are vastly different. Western Buddhism is mainly secular and atheistic, but that is certainly not the case in the East.