Director Roger Nygard traveled the world asking theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyday people 85 tough questions to try to understand The Nature of Existence! Now that he’s asked the experts, it’s YOUR TURN! To offer your own insights on today’s question, “Can we take what we like about a religion/belief system and make our own version and throw out the rest?”, Leave a Reply below!
If you mean “Is it possible?” then the answer is of course yes. People do it all the time.
If the answer is “Should we do it?” the answer is that if we wish to know the truth then we should call into question everything we experience. If someone tells us something that holds up to rational scrutiny then of course we should agree with them and adopt their idea. If not then we should reject their idea even if we like lots of other other ideas. We should be loyal to the truth and not to any particular people, ideology, or religion.
Some people who would agree with an idea like this would do so because they advocate having a hodge-podge of a philosophy which borrows incompatible ideas from this or that source without thinking through whether they are consistent and rational. I think that’s an absurd approach. We would never say “In order to understand properly how to rollerskate you should accept all kinds of contradictory ideas that disagree with one another and behave as though they were all true.” Such a person would never be able to rollerskate or do anything else by that kind of philosophy. Knowing the truth about philosophy is at bottom no different than the way of knowing the truth about anything else.
People certainly do all the time, the real question is what are the consequences of that? And that depends on how you go about it. When Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, I would say that was a good change. Some might say he should have brought it to committee first, and they might have a good point.
I see belief systems as a way for discussions about who we are to continue across generations. Each generation tries to pass on the system that they believe helped them survive and thrive. Often surviving for one group means the opposite for another, so we still have a long way to go toward a truly peaceful world. Frequently, what gets written down and passed on is not really how it happened or what actually worked.
So yes, as we get better at learning from our past and sorting out the facts, we should throw some things out. We have been doing it for thousands of years and it seems to be working out okay.
People can and do, all the time. Some religions expect you to do this: some expect you to follow their instructions, each and every one of them. However, ultimately the individual is the only one who can make the choice as to whether or what they wish to follow.
This pic-and -choose approach to religion is causing all the problems. There’s nothing called moderate believers for example. Either you are right or wrong. The provision for interpretetion, multiple layer of meaning and metaphor is not helping us at all. We don’t need poetic beauty of the verses. Nor we need romantic mysticism veiled in allegories, parables and fairy tales. The scriptures should have been straight and unambiguous in its message. But unfortunately, all of them dropped from the sky like a cheap home theatre system manual where multiple models are covered in a single manual, confusing us all the time on issues like which features apply to which models!
Every religion has a nerdy, mystic wing. For them, daily rituals don’t apply, they can read between lines, or can dig dipper meaning from the same mundane verses others memorise like a parakit and knows direct hotline numbers to God. Why don’t God send a soft cover ‘dummies’ illustrated version scripture for the lay people and an hard cover academic cross referenced version complete with glossaries, indexes and full citations for the wise guys? We could then by pass those fear mongering middlemen called priests.
Its funny how believers by pass the embarrassing parts of their scriptures or religions for the sake of faith and say “I don’t question God’s intentions, if there’s a discripensy, there must be a reason, may be its good for us, or it is only applicable for that particular time and socio-political situation (Oh yes! Who said that this scripture is a complete code of life and that God can see past present and future?) or God is testing us (the classic one) bla bla…”
In this regard, my personal policy is: For my fellow humans, I accept the whole basket of apples if there’s a couple of bad apples. But for God, I throw away the whole basket even if there’s only one rotten apple there. God’s perfection should be reflected in his/her revealation/scriptures, otherwise we have reason to assume that it is created by a man or it has been altered. Period.
I don’t see that humans have ever done anything else.
Many people do just that. Choose the bits that still measure up to modern sensibilities and ignore the rest. The rest often being formerly grave and severe matters that past generations spilled much blood over.
You cannot, a religion is a set of rules and regulations. When you break them then you are not in that religion. Yes, you can do that with “way of living”. You are free to choose your way of living.
everyone has their own religion. what we can religions are just groupings of people who believe similar things