{"id":10761,"date":"2014-12-17T14:21:32","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T19:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=10761"},"modified":"2014-12-17T14:21:32","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T19:21:32","slug":"your-religion-is-it-bigger-than-a-breadbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2014\/12\/your-religion-is-it-bigger-than-a-breadbox.html","title":{"rendered":"Your religion… is it bigger than a breadbox?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"signpost\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been meaning for a while to highlight an interesting project that Christian H has been carrying out on his blog: coming up with taxonomies for religions<\/a>. And I\u2019m a big fan of the\u00a0reason<\/em> he started this project<\/a>:<\/p>\n

While trying to find\u00a0ways to frame my understanding of different religions, and different individuals\u2019 religion,<\/a>\u00a0is a worthwhile activity in itself, I would be lying if I claimed that my primary motivation was anthropological or psychological. Rather, I\u2019ve primarily been imagining that this project would be useful for writing fiction: in a realist context, for creating a plausible variety of plausible religious characters (including those who believe themselves irreligious*); in a fantastic context, for creating a plausible variety of plausible religious characters\u00a0and\u00a0<\/i>for creating a plausible variety of plausible fictional religions. If you write or worldbuild for any other reason, I suspect it might also be useful to you; the place where I can imagine this happening the most for the most people would be when playing D&D or some other tabletop RPG.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Christian comes up with a bunch of interesting questions, to help you as writer\/character creator\/anthropologist get a feel for a (real or fictional!) religion and the way it shapes the life of its followers. \u00a0For instance, is the religion mostly about following specific, concrete rules, applying more abstract\/highfalutin\u2019 maxims to the choices we face in life, or finding a way to make the right kind of story out of your life? \u00a0He does a good job connecting these prompts back to the literature (not exclusively of religion\u2013Judith Butler turns up, too<\/a>).<\/p>\n

A few preliminary comparisons come to mind. The view of religion as obedience to commands sounds an awful lot like what\u00a0Tillich<\/a>\u00a0describes as a juristic type of faith, and the view of religion as application of universal principles sounds like Tillich\u2019s ethical type of faith, though it also sounds like Tillich\u2019s element of prophetic self-criticism in its willingness to change according to context. Meanwhile, the view of religion as the attempt to give an account of oneself to the universe, or to God, sounds somewhat like the experience of holiness as judgement over the present that Tillich says characterizes the moral type of faith. I would be hesitant, though, to equate the view of religion as a provider of answers with the experience of holiness in the here and now; at most they seem alike in their focus on finding something in the world before you. The two schemas seem to have some overlap, but they differ enough that I don\u2019t think we should collapse them together, or at least not quite yet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think readers of this blog will have a lot of fun exploring Christian\u2019s posts (index post for his sequence here<\/a>) and he\u2019d appreciate your comments and suggestions. \u00a0Personally, I find it quite helpful because it offers a script for examining religion that\u00a0isn\u2019t<\/em> the one we\u2019re used to, which may have been too tainted by past arguments to be able to provoke inquiry and curiosity (cf my posts on exploring philosophies in a LARPing spirit<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Christian\u2019s project reminds me a bit of a Sorting Hat typology that recently caught fire among my friends. \u00a0I\u2019ll link you all to the About page<\/a> for the details, but the very<\/em> fast explanation is that Sorting Hat writers classify the houses according to two dimensions: Idealist\/Loyalist and Felt\/Constructed. \u00a0Idealist houses are focused on the Good and the True, loyalist houses tend to root their values in the needs of\/connections to other individuals. \u00a0Felt houses have an intuitive connection to whatever motivates them, constructed ones are systematizers. \u00a0Thus:<\/p>\n