The Deep Questions about Religion.

In this post I’d like to start exploring religion from a different perspective, using language as a metaphor. I’ve been pulling together my thoughts on this for a couple of months now, and I’ve found that looking at religion in this way resolves the fundamental issues I talked about in my last post on this topic, The Search for Truth, and explains a number of other puzzles about religion such as:

• What is the purpose of religion?
• Does it make sense to ask whether a religion is “true”?
• Are some religions “better” than others?
• Is it possible to predict the future development of a religion — whether it will grow, change, or wither away?
• How is the development of a religion changed by contact with other religions?
• In what ways can religions vary? Are they infinitely variable, or are there limits?
• Why are the older religions of humanity (shamanism, paganism, etc.) quite similar all over the world, while the newer religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, scientific theories) so different from one another?
• Why is it that children seem to be natural born pagans?
• And of course: how do you go about choosing a religion that is best for yourself?

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I have spent a fascinating morning discussing polytheism with some great folks over at Songs of Unforgetting. Check it out! Thank you, Kay, for kicking off the fascinating discussion, and James, Bernulf, and Hrafnkell for all your insight.

A couple of days ago, not long after breakfast, my oldest daughter, who is 8, was coming upstairs to ask me a question when I heard her give a little shriek of surprise. In my house, kids are shrieking and screaming and laughing all the time, so I didn’t think twice about it. But then she came up, all a-twitter, and told me she’d seen an apparition behind her on the stairs. Read the rest of this entry »