Religion for Idiots
Welcome to Religion 4 Idiots
Indeed more properly basic or elementary Religious Studies (or Religious Education and Training) should be made available for everyone with an interest in religion, so that basic crucial awareness exists and can be raised.
My name is Mark Bennett. I am the owner, founder and manager of this blog and I am a Graduate Student of Religious-Studies and Post-Graduate Student of Philosophy. I also self-identify as religious and spiritual. I self-identify as a theist (especially panentheist) and sometimes an agnostic.
I do not formally or officially belong to any organized religion, but you could say I am a part of the system of religious structure and establishment, as I grew up Pentecostal Christian, after experiencing several transitions within my tradition (Baptist, Open-Brethren, Non-Denominational/Evangelical, Calvinistic) at 23 I became an Atheist.
Many years later, I became a theist again, and now you could call me a Christian, depending on what you and I mean, but I openly acknowledge myself to be the heretic of heretics per the three branches of Christianity: Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Mainstream Protestantism.
Along with many portions within western modernity, I am very much a byproduct of low-Church Protestant (non-denominational) Christianity; along with its breeding of Individualism, Secularism. But i'm very self-defined and identify with some specific aspects or strands of eastern thought (Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism etc) and various ancient philosophical traditions (Platonism, Skepticism, Stoicism) or modern philosophies (pluralism, perennialism), but primarily as Idealist, and Universalist.
None of these terms are fixed, binding or absolute, but they are reductionistic foundations to begin a conversation and point towards the direction I can describe myself as and converse with. If you are interested in religious figures and icons I identify with or view as divine, firstly and primarily the Lord Jesus Christ, next: Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) and Sri Krishna.
Concerning my blog title, as you will come to see: by "Religion" I mean more than what is commonly understood in the general vernacular.
I will unpackage the meaning of religion as exposited in the academic branch of religious studies in future posts.
But for now I will zoom on my usage of the term idiots.
By "idiots" I mean no offense at all.
In-fact I take the psychological/medical usage of idiot as obsolete:
"A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive".
Rather I want to firstly emphasize the etymological usage:
"ORIGIN OF IDIOT: 1250–1300; Middle English < Latin idiōta < Greek idiṓtēs private person, layman, person lacking skill or expertise, equivalent to idiō- (lengthened variant of idio- idio-, perhaps by analogy with stratiōtēs professional soldier, derivative of stratiá army) + -tēs agent noun suffix"
And:
"WORD ORIGIN FOR IDIOT: C13: from Latin idiōta ignorant person, from Greek idiōtēs private person, one who lacks professional knowledge, ignoramus; see idio-"
And secondly the more general usage:
"idiot/ (ˈɪdɪət) /noun(2) a foolish or senseless person"
And:
"Idiot[ id-ee-uht ] noun Informal. an utterly foolish or senseless person"
It is my contention that sometimes the more formal and historic etymological usage, which can be stated as untrained, uneducated or unlearned in-conjunction with certain personality traits and their unfortunate configuration can lead to the latter more generic foolishness or senselessness form of idiocy.
There are many categories, kinds and classes of people who are 'idiots' (formally uneducated) in religion and who are open-minded students, but there is also unfortunately a large and noisy non-quantifiable section of them who also happen to be the type of idiots (foolish/senseless) who are not merely formally uneducated in Religious Studies but make ignorant or problematic claims about religion or a specific religion(s), which I intend to address in future posts.
One could find this surprising, but this is not limited to hostile, adversarial skeptics of religion or critics of specific religions such as made by the self-proclaimed brights or the new-atheists, anti-theists or rationalists and such, but even such people exist among the religious themselves, typically in the form of some kind of fundamentalism or literalism who are inherently uncharitable to alternative religious traditions.
But there is also no need to require an excessively liberal or progressive stance towards religion, where religion is made exempt from the appropriate and proper amount of criticism or even where 'all religions' (or expressions of them) are somehow made (or forced to be understood) as equally balanced or unfair, moral or immoral, rational or irrational, in every civilization and each society as eqivolent to one another in doctrines, practices or social benefits, consequences and ramifications.
As if all religions and all expressions of them required some unmerited sort of blind ignorant extension of tolerance and respect or had to be uncharitably given a faithful axiomatic assumption that they are all equally morally as good or bad as one another or granted some equal assumption of worth and value and/or none of them were bad at all, unless they are co-opted.
These assumptions for or against can all be contested and challenged, as can anything i'm (also) observing, but I'm advocating we be cautious; that is to take account of the whole perspective or obtain well-rounded insights of the entirety of the religious tradition, and nuance these traditions responsibly. There is a delicate balance to be had between unfairly and sweepingly generalizing and being blind to religious realities.
Instead I will aim for maximal conceivable objectivity in our evaluation and assessment of the field of religious studies, as employed to further educate the public in general, including the open-minded students and even the specific groups of people mentioned above about a part of religious studies they may be ignorant or unaware of, that can further aid their research and personal conclusions.
References
(1) https://www.dictionary.com/browse/idiot?s=t
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