thread: 2007-01-10 : Some questions about worship
On 2007-01-16, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Yeah, that's why I said "mainstream" of Judaism-Christianity-Islam above. There's a distinct family of faiths that have strong influences from both the J-C-I and Zoroasterianism, but which adopt a fairly standard and recognizable combination of Gnostic and Dualist ideas that, in my mind at least, set them apart from either parent.
It's possible for well-thought-out categories to reflect important realities, not merely our own preconceptions and intellectual convenience. That said, any description of reality is going to be less complete than reality itself, and categories are always imperfect. "The map is not the territory"—but damn, I don't want to go somewhere without a map.
