thread: 2007-01-10 : Some questions about worship
On 2007-01-16, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
I get aggravated by people making sweeping generalizations about other folks' faiths too, but there is some fire to that smoke. From my admittedly amateur study, besides the obvious historical common ground—e.g. the holy stories of the Abrahamic patriarchs reacting explosively with the cultural milieu of the Hellenistic world - there are real similarities among the mainstreams of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that mark them as a distinct "family" among world religions:
1) the very idea of "scripture" and "canon," i.e. a specified set of sacred texts endorsed by the authority figures of the religion as being of extraordinary value, and whose proper interpretation is the object of intense study and debate. (The Indian Mahabharata, for example, just doesn't seem to fulfill the same function culturally).
2) monotheism (even if the "mono-" has three Persons), i.e. the idea that the divine is a unified entity possessed of will and consciousness, and that while it may manifest in various aspects of the material world, its whole truth is above and outside the universe. This aspect also manifests in a corresponding impatience/intolerance for animist and similar traditions.
3) the idea of an eternal, individual soul whose good and evil aspects are somehow judged at death and which, if deserving, will ultimately be resurrected in the body (an idea that has Egyptian roots and which is alien to mainstream pre-1st Century AD Judaism, but which is common to all three faiths since then).
4) the idea that some things are good and some things are evil, not merely as two aspects of some greater balance or two perspectives on the same truth, but as a matter of cosmic principle, and that each individual's choice between good and evil is something of profound importance.
Note that I haven't listed anything about what good and evil are supposed to be, specifically; everyday ethics tend to be pretty similar in all faith traditions, possibly because societies that preach "cheat everyone you can" and "hurt others before they hurt you" don't tedn to last very long.
Obviously there are other faiths that share any number of these traits, and there are a host of profound differences between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and within each tradition. But nevertheless I think it's possible to speak intelligently and meaningfully of a Judeo-Christian or, more accurately, a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.
