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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 don’t understand how this interpretation can exist. Christianity is life-denying to the core: man is fallen, the world profane and corrupt, and the only refuge is the kingdom of heaven which only God can bring about. Accumulating wealth is frowned upon (you are supposed to give it to the Jews instead), celibacy is strongly encouraged (demanded in Luke, a Marcionite text), authority is not to be questioned. The Jewish God leads his people out of slavery, the Christian one tells them to be obedient and promises to rescue their souls after they work themselves to death. There is simply no way you can square this with the idea of progress, unless progress simply means converting people to Christianity, which is supposed to be the only thing that matters, and even then we are heading towards the Great Apostasy.
Accordingly, the traditional Christian view of history is that of decline, perhaps interspersed with divine interventions here and there. Muslims, likewise, are obligated to believe that each generation of mankind is worse than the previous one: the notion that one can know better than the Prophet is unthinkable.
A genealogical continuity between certain ideas in no way implies a logical connection, because logical consequence is not what they were selected for. Liberalism has shown itself to be self-sufficient, it doesn’t rely on dusky old religions to penetrate foreign populations. If you want a memeplex centered around progress, you should be completely satisfied with it.
Like, maybe your Christianity, but I feel like there are tons of others out there. The ones where man is made in God's image, told to be fruitful and multiply to fill the earth with little beings that are meant to "graduate" by resurrection into basically being God. Where the God man came to let himself be killed, apparently "so that you can have life more abundantly". As KnotGodel points out, many of your intermediate claims are pretty debatable (and debated by different groups of Christians), which likely means that your personal view is not necessarily that authoritative concerning Christianity's "core", at least not to the point that one should fail to understand how other interpretations could exist.
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