Reddit Reddit reviews The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion

We found 12 Reddit comments about The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Reference
Books
Encyclopedias & Subject Guides
Mythology & Folklore Encyclopedias
The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion
Check price on Amazon

12 Reddit comments about The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion:

u/HegelianHermit · 34 pointsr/AskHistorians

It is an immensely narrow field of study. Everything I've posted so far comes out of my studies into mythopoetics in college. In essence, it is the study of the historical development of human consciousness through myth and what few written works remain. Ultimately, it's the study of the plasticity of human consciousness and how language and cultural conception develops your reality for you.

I'll link more books which touch on this subject!

Mircea Eliade - The Sacred and the Profane

Julian Jaynes - The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Some of the science he employs has been brought into question, but his stuff on language and historical analysis of myth is super interesting and on point)

u/domdest · 11 pointsr/ainbow

You knew what it meant. ;) Descriptive grammar is a bitch, ain't it?

For one, I can make sure that your reputation among this subreddit's user base is trash. But you're already doing a fine job of that. For another, I can ride every comment you make in this thread until you get positively sick of dealing with me. Neither of us seems to want that.

Let me tell you why you're a fucking moron in the terms that the academics use though, since you want so badly to be schooled. What you posit is that orthodoxy is problematic, and then you make a huge leap of logic by applying orthodoxy to all religion. However, all religion is not orthodoxic, only the dominant religions of western culture. So right off the bat, half the globe doesn't prescribe to your naive take on religion.

Let me familiarize you with orthopraxy, since your Dunning Kruger is showing. The difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy is that orthodoxy describes a religion as "having proper belief", while orthopraxy describes a religion as "having proper practice". Furthermore, there is the additional component of whether any faith is dogmatic or non-dogmatic. There are orthodoxic and orthopraxic religions that are dogmatic, but many more orthopraxic religions are non-dogmatic.

So what does that look like? A good example of a dogmatic, orthodoxic religion is Christianity (and really any Abrahamic faith). Even Confucianism is arguably some degree of orthodoxic, however the teachings of Confucius have much more to do with how one lives, so it would fall under orthopraxy. You can be a great Buddhist without ever believing in Buddha, as well. There are Hindu sects that don't dogmatically believe in the gods, but they do place emphasis on "right practice".

Most, if not all, pagan faiths (allowing for marginal ones with which I haven't yet become acquainted; there are hundreds if not thousands of ancient world cultures and attempts to reconstruct their faiths start every day it seems) have no doctrine, and what's more, many of them de-emphasize the divine or even don't believe in them at all. What is common among most, if not all pagan faiths is do ut des, or "I give so that you may give". For some this is a direct exchange with the gods - myself, for example. For others this is a means of connecting with a higher consciousness. This forms the basis of ritual, offering, and sacrifice. Before you foolishly squall "herp derp nobody sacrifices in the modern day", yes they fucking do, it is legal to kill livestock in many parts of the world, even the US, and furthermore sacrifice has expanded to encompass giving up anything of value, not just life.

>You can't hold all pagan beliefs simultaneously, so please if you really had that much research on the topic it would show.

In point of fucking fact, yes I can. I don't personally - I primarily practice Norse heathenry. This is another piece of evidence of your perception of world religions through a Christian lens, that to worship divinities outside of one's religion is blasphemy. Very few pagan religions have any concept of blasphemy. Roman and Greek civic cultus focused primarily on "what was good for society", which is why the Jewish diaspora was possible, while Rome had a big problem with Christianity. Because, and only because, Christians were a threat to the civic cultus of the society in ways that Judaism was not.

This concept, the admittance of syncretism and the worship of many - even all - pantheons, is called "pluralism", and it is almost universal to paganism. There is no doctrine (see that word again?) or dogma (oh and that one) that demands or demanded historically that pagans only worship one pantheon. In fact, to think that pantheons existed discreetly from nation to nation in the first place is reductive and downright foolish, especially among tribal cultures. There is documented evidence that the Suebi in Germany for example worshipped Isis. Possibly interpretatio romana, but this is one of many examples. Another would be the similarities between Frigg and Freyja, between Ingvi and Freyr, and the many syncretisms between Greek and Roman gods. No one would have any reason to object to a person making cult offerings to another god, so long as that other god didn't demand exclusivity (like the Christian god).

So shut the fuck up.

Edit:

Reference Materials:


u/multubunu · 4 pointsr/AskHistorians

> the ancient ritual of slaying Tiamat wasn't simply a dummy show, a pantomime of what happened in ancient times, it was actually a recreation of what happened. Since the world was made from Tiamat's corpse, if they didn't re-kill the dragon the world might end!

May I recommend M. Eliade's The Sacred and the Prophane (originally published 1957), not the latest and greatest but a good read none the less.

u/JohnnyMnemo · 4 pointsr/TrueAtheism

My parents were very a-religious. My Mother took us to church approximately twice in our lives, and besides celebrating the normal holidays (Christmas, even Easter to an extent), religious sentiment never entered our lives: no prayer, no bible, no discussion about God whatsoever, etc.

I don't believe my Father has ever darkened the door of a church, and is even more a-religious. If you asked him, now, he'd say that Christianity is necessary to the fabric of being American, but that's more to do with his sense of patriotism and the history of rule-by-law than by any sense of an omnipotent being in control of his destiny. That is, he'd say that the value of Christianity is a cultural force and not a spiritual one.

I'd feel comfortable telling either of them that I'm atheist, although honestly it's a non-issue so it just hasn't come up.

FWIW, one of the features of this upbringing is that I majored in Religious Studies in college. I wanted to learn more about what it was all about, why people espoused this particular set of beliefs, what the foundation of their psychology was based on. Since I had very little informal exposure to it.

What I can say is that, for a significant part of humanity, they need to feel that there is "A Plan", or the effort and suffering that they go through with just isn't worthwhile. And someone that can still manage to get up everyday, who has actively resisted a sense of having A Plan, is very disturbing to their psyche. It's as alien to their way of thinking as an ascetic.

Some of the best (but dense) reading on this is Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane.

the tl;dr is that an ungrounded existence is terrifying for a large part of humanity, so they have established religious constructs and rituals, and imbued them with meaning, to give them a sense of grounding. To them, someone that can live ungrounded may as well be able to defy gravity at will.

u/blackstar9000 · 3 pointsr/atheism

I would skip Lewis, honestly. He's popular among certain Potestant trends of thought, but the Anglicans consider him something of an embarrassment, and he himself readily admits that he's no theologian. If you really want a pop-theology argument, I'd go to Chesterson's Orthodoxy instead, but even that's pretty low tier apologetic.

If you want serious theology and apologetic, Lewis has plenty of contemporaries that are worth reading. I'd suggest the following:

u/108beads · 3 pointsr/AskAcademia

Agreed--just fin(n)ish already. But if you want theory: Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. Classic, good read, Amazon comments & reviews can give you a sense of what's there.

http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Profane-Nature-Religion/dp/015679201X/ref=la_B000AP85TS_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395197838&sr=1-1

u/xX-Coffee-Eater-Xx · 1 pointr/asatru

Is this the right book?
EDIT: Formatting

u/[deleted] · 1 pointr/politics

I am not the one playing with words. Please try to be more open minded and accept the fact that there are many many people making contributions in this field, other than a couple of names that comes up again and again in say /r/atheism.

http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Profane-Nature-Religion/dp/015679201X

u/smaerdnekorb · 1 pointr/occult
u/Azdahak · 1 pointr/entp

> How did you come from

Simple. I'm interested in the structure of myth, the structure of what Jung called the unconscious archetypes, and why the brain creates them, perhaps as some consequence of the human realization that we are destined to die. The dread of non-existence.

Most "pagan" religions in practice were deliberately invented in the 1960s. So to me they're not very interesting in that regard. The Wicca I've knowns are interested in is what color candle one should use to cast a love spell, and pretending that the Christians killed off the so-called Mother Goddess Witch Cult in the Middle Ages, rather than realizing Margaret Murray was just dead wrong about her theories.

> Have you been involved in nepoaganism? Do you know the research that goes into the recontruction of each branch? The books they base their research on?

You can't reconstruct what never existed in the first place. Wicca, the most popular form of modern paganism, is a sham. As is anything with "druid" in the name.

There are very few sources of authentic non-Christian religious practices from medieval Europe, never mind earlier. Most of the Norse sagas are all filtered through Christian tradition. The Slav religion is mostly lost to history except for a handful of names. Everything that survives is corrupted by Christianity.

With other gods? Well you cannot worship Aztec gods unless you perform blood letting and human sacrifice. Huitzilopochtli demands it to make the sun move. If you're not doing that, you're not "authentic".

If you argue that the gods can "update" what they want and no longer require scarification, bloodletting or ripping out the heart of a willing sacrifice, then any historical "reconstruction" is pointless to begin with -- because the gods may want something new or have changed over the centuries. So why bother? It's also a very convenient excuse to get rid of the parts you don't like (human sacrifice, which incidentally the Norse also are known to have practiced) and stick in parts you do. Of course, Christians have been doing this same thing for centuries.

> I mean, had you been a profane I would've brushed it aside, but you studied these things, you have no excuse.

Lol, a "profane"? Sounds good. One of my favorite scholars in this regard.

> You studied the documents upon which Hellenists and Asatruars base their knowledge.
And somehow, somehow you managed to dismiss them altogether.

Somehow? More like exactly because. I can actually read ancient Greek, and I know enough Old English to pretend I can read Old Norse :D

I contend it's actually impossible for anyone in the West to believe in these gods in the way they were historically worshiped, simply because we no longer live in a world where the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane was distinct. We humans of the 21st century cannot ignore our knowledge of the universe.

That is why these are merely "toy" religions. People light candles and say "norse prayers" and ask to get a job promotion, an easier pregnancy, do well on an exam.

For people practicing these religions in the Iron Age and later, their worship was a matter of absolute survival against the supernatural. For them, human sacrifice and other such barbarities was a necessity.


> Mind if I ask you exactly what you studied in occultism and Greek religion? You sound like someone who hasn't studied it.

Well, just looking at that bookshelf I count about 40 scholarly books on what I deem "mythology". So take that as you will. Most of what i know about Greek religion is about Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, which are of course later developments of the Eleusian mysteries, etc., and intercalated with earlier Christianity.

> It's not like Occultism is one singular path. Hermeticism, LaVeyanism, the Greek mysteries....get particular. What did you study?

Anton LeVey was an atheist and Hedonist. He uses Satan as a symbol in one part to represent hedonism, and in a second part to annoy the fuck out of Christians.

Otherwise I'm not sure what you're asking. I'm interested in the history and the myth, not in digging a pit in my back yard to do the taurobolium. Anton LeVey's Necronomicon is gibberish. I should know, because I've seen the real thing.


u/Bruin116 · 1 pointr/atheism

You won't regret it =)

Here's the Amazon link; I'll let the reviews speak for themselves.