Again, I don’t mean studying religions from a religious standpoint. But just studying different philosophies of these religions, different stories, their gods, their prophets if any…
I recently read about how the God of the Abrahamic religions developed. Apparently he started off as “Yahweh”, who was some D list god of storms in some Canaanite religion. The early Israelites adopted him as their God initially. He was angry, dangerous and not “loving”. But then, over time, this character got combined with another god “El”, who was the bearded, wise “god of gods” that capital G God is often depicted as. The history of this is so cool!
Apparently Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, which seemed to be a trend then? Apparently there were OTHER failed Jewish prophets who claimed to be messiahs who would rebuild the temple of God in Israel (which the Jewish folk wanted to do for a very long time?).
Then Muhammad comes in, claims that God’s word was eventually corrupted throughout the centuries by humans, and that the Quaran is the uncorrupted word of God himself. Also, the “I am the last prophet, and that anyone who claims to be a prophet after me is a false prophet” clause was quite interesting to me!
Then you have the Hindus doing their own thing. Apparently there’s more to Hinduism than just mythology and the Gods. Apparently certain schools of Hinduism are kinda atheistic too??? Quick clarification though. Atheistic does not necessitate scientific thought. Buddhism largely does not proclaim God too???
I used to view religions as unscientific explanations of the world and an attempt to assert objective morality. I mean this isn’t wrong, but religions are so much more than that! They’re thousands of years of human stories and mythologies, usually quite creative! You can see how cults form, how different cults are appropriated, how they are used by the ruling class to keep on ruling…
I dunno, it’s just fun to read about and learn about!
Regrettably many people think that all religions are just picking some deity (or deities) to worship, because they route their understanding via Christianity. Plus you get the additional problem of people really not grasping how you can’t just translate concepts 1=1. “God” in Christianity is VERY different than “God” in Buddhism. One of my favorite pet peeves is when people take something like the idea of Reincarnation and say it doesn’t make sense because they only look at it through the lens of their own (Western, usually) cultural and philosophical conditioning. It’s like taking a power plug from Europe and then call it poorly designed when it doesn’t fit into a socket in the USA.
Many religions have plenty of very very sophisticated philosophy behind them, and often the belief systems were functional, as far as they went, for people’s every day lives. Interesting thing is that some of the philosophical frameworks actually are on an equal footing with scientific materialism, namely the ones in the sphere of nonduality. They’re equally unprovable and disprovable as matter-first philosophy, yet materialism has posited itself as first in the minds of most people. Meaning, many people think that all other worldviews must adhere to materialist sensibilities, including ones that challenge the idea that matter comes first - which is actually logically fallacious but people don’t like it when that’s pointed out.
Keep on studying!
100% this, it’s very important to understand how different different cultures can be. Something a lot of people often get wrong about other religions is that they believe there are virtues and sins and punishment after death like there are in Abrahamic religions.