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Last week, @ShariaHeap brought up some interesting points on the evolution of religion under the discussion of Bronze Age history that went under-discussed, in my humble opinion.
Specifically they ask:
To me, this question can be boiled down to - are all religions equally good, or are some better than others?
Of course we have to get into the 'objective morality versus subjective/post-modern plurality' debate here, which can be it's own morass. But I am curious about how, if you do take religions as potentially better or worse comparatively, how would they stack up?
I've been writing and thinking about an idea that many religions which are popular today are essentially negative when it comes to divine beings - as in, the popular Vitalism that talks about Mother Earth and the interconnectedness of the universe basically deny any explicit 'being' such as God. Typically the ultimate experience of divinity can be revealed in a sort of non-dualistic merging with the universe, or dissolution of the ego.
Buddhism and Hinduism in some strains, as well as Taoism, have heavily influenced this line of mystical thinking.
On the other end you have the more 'positive' versions of religion or mystical experience, that posit the existence of a God or pantheon of gods. While the two can coexist to some degree, like in Hinduism with Brahman etc, they do seem to have very fundamentally different structures at their core.
In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton takes a stab at more negative conceptions of the divine, fiercely stating:
In this view, the more Eastern or pessimistic or cyclical religions are fundamentally destructive on a larger scale - they argue that nothing means anything, that all will end the same as it began, reality is ultimately an illusion, et cetera.
By contrast, Christianity and other monotheistic religions push us forward to some sort of Progress, which as we have seen... can have its own issues.
I'm curious if this specific topic has been discussed before, and if other folks here have anything to add?
I'm not quite sure of what my firm view on this debate is, but it is clear to me that the specifics of culture matter and that while genes are important they certainly aren't fully prescriptive in terms of the culture they lead to. People (including those from the same genetic population as those who take another route) can be destroyed by 'bad' memes and elevated by 'good' ones that are bestowed on them by other peoples, I think you really can convert a population and change their way of life considerably (and perhaps ultimately reflected genetically over many generations) through ideology.
Regarding 'Eastern' vs 'Western' (or Christian, as Chesterton suggests) religion, I think this is a relatively classic 19th century argument for the supremacy of a kind of Christian missionary imperialism, or at least missionary movements in general (which reminds me there was a great comment recently that argued that descendants of American missionaries to China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries played a highly outsized role in US foreign policy, particularly toward China, over the 20th century). More generally, it's the idea that polytheistic religions that involve elements typically common to European, pre-Columbian American and Asian pagan religions have an inherently lower respect for human life, and are willing to sacrifice it or end it or abandon it or make it suffer more willingly or with fewer qualms than Christians are, or at least do so less reluctantly than Christians do.
I am skeptical that this is the truth.
Best extant example of this is North vs South Korea, same people, same genetics, same language even, but one has the meme of capitalism and the other the meme of communism. See the massive difference it makes to living standards.
This is my go to example of the importance on environment on a person's/society's living standards, but the people who generally argue in favour of environment/against genes having a large impact don't seem to like it very much for some reason or the other...
Or shtetl/non-shtetl Ashkenazi, Sakoku/Meiji restoration Japan, etc.
It doesn't matter how intelligent you are if all you're trying to do is figure out more elaborate ways to stare up your own asshole.
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Yeah I have yet to see a facts-based, evidence filled argument that this disregard for life is the case. Typically there's a more high-level argument about symbols and big ideas going on, which is what I do find compelling.
One of the more interesting and perhaps derivative things Chesterton mentions in The Everlasting Man is that the Ouroborous is a circle, a negation that is always fixed in size (or something) whereas the Cross can be extended infinitely, and posits a battle of two lines going on forever. (presumably Good versus Evil)
While this type of symbology isn't an exact science, I do find it quite thought provoking. There's also something to be said for the typically Buddhist idea that 'Enlightenment' is a concrete stage that can be reached, versus the traditional Christian idea of 'theosis' or the Sisyphean struggle to become like God, while knowing you will never even come close to the ideal.
I agree with you that the 19th century arguments likely haven't told the full story, but I do think there's something to all these religious differences. Unfortunately even having this discussion in most mainstream places nowadays is impossible, because the mere mention of one religion potentially being better than another immediately shuts down the conversation.
People who don’t believe in any religious cosmology want religions to have the legibility of apartments: each religion has identical features even if they’re decorated differently.
(To be fair, when I was growing up Christian, I heard all non-Abrahamic religions legibly classed as “pagan”.)
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I agree, it’s hard to have these arguments today. At the same time I think that to many (say) Americans writing in 1910, there was the obvious underlying reality that all the prosperous countries in the world were Western and Christian nations. Even Japan, which was by far the most industrialized Asian nation, apparently had a GDP/capita that was maybe one third of the US/UK/Australia/industrialized NW Europe. It was more self-evident, maybe, that there appeared to be some cultural factor holding back progress in the Far East.
I think relevantly that incorporation of memes from Christianity in Asian cultures was part of the recipe for those place’s prosperity, and that these western memes are distinctively Christian and not Islamic or Jewish or pagan or Zoroastrian.
I’d point to certain Christian marriage laws which tend to be part of modernization packages as meaningfully affecting time preference on reasonable time scales, for one example. Mass literacy is also in practice pretty strongly associated with Christian missionary activity(and unlike the Arabic abjad, both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets can be used to represent any language more or less phonetically, even if say English or French don’t do so in practice), although less uniquely so.
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It’s true, although I think you can still make a strong argument that modern Western nations are not Christian in any real sense, and that the East has mostly copied the things that worked from the West rather than find their own unique ways of managing growth.
Then again, I’m skeptical of economic growth and material power as a true measure of goodness or value anyway, so the point is kind of moot imo. At least on moral grounds.
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