Lit Should Theism appear more in canon?

Haha, Nightsistered.

 

I hate doing this, but real world examples can apply. It's now considered fringe lunacy to believe the Creation myth which underpins Christianity. It has gone from being an unquestioned truth in mainstream society to a quaint parable.

You have to work on an assumption of "what would you personally do if you found out that the Buddhists/Daoists had been right all along?"

That's why I suggest a decimation like aspect.

 

There are ways in which such things can be harmonized.

About the only way you can conclusively disprove a religion is to have another win(be right)-judgement day, damnation, or no religion be right-conclusive evidence of no afterlife(even that can be contested).

Religion is a resilient thing-even the hardest atheists have been forced to admit that.

 

I think we're hitting a wall here due to personal issues because I came to believe in a Hindu and Daoist interpretation of Christianity (with quantum physics) in part due to Star Wars. I determined the way I was raised was wrong and tried to take what I still believed in and combine it with what I believed was true.

 

yes, and I lived in a Chinese country for a while where I learned normative values aren't, and that nothing is assumed as universal and constant.

Hence my contention that if you have no baseline assumptions about supremacy of faith structures or normative religious values and apply a purely cold anthropological lense you end up at a different conclusion.

Neither is more right than the other, but we may at least be able to appreciate the other's perspective now?

 

The problem is that there is nothing about the Force that conclusively would disprove a God, if one wanted to believe that the evidence simply proved a sentient creator. In our own world we see that religions adapt to the scientific evidence around them - Christians now believe that the '7 days of creation' refers to the 14 billion years which it took to get us to the beginning of homo sapiens. Although the Force most closely aligns to Daoism and Buddhism, that wouldn't automatically decimate belief in theism - in fact it's possible that it would only drive theism to a place where it is 'true' (i.e. the point where it is merely a metaphor for a greater truth).

Even if someone were to learn about the Force the way the Jedi do it would still be possible for them to create a theist religion with the scientific framework. That's the point ultimately - that sentient beings take the ultimate truth and we apply metaphors to make better sense of it. The metaphors would still take the form of theism in many instances.

 

ok but again, I feel like this approach is still too Judeo-Christian in its thinking. You need to experience first hand what a non-Judeo Christian framework feels like to abandon any notion that it is normative.

 

Y'all know the interaction of science, religion, and philosophy has never been this merely destructive interaction. The history of philosophical theology and theological philosophy is a slow and complex dialectic (not in the precise Hegelian sense) in which new (and old ideas) provoke new questions and hermeneutics. The supposed modern challenges to religion are really nothing new. Now Darth Invictus, from the history of Christian thought, the Church Father would not have found non-falsifiability a good defense of Christianity. On the contrary, many of the appeals were to the inner logic (incoherence) of the Pagan position. That Christ was understood as the λόγος through whom the world was created demanded an inherent intelligibility, if obscured by the darkness of the human intellect. Christianity from nearly the beginning assumed it had a philosophical content. Modern, post-enlightenment fideism is not found there.

As for the question of normative values and "cold anthropologism", thereir lies an assumption of basic anthropologism to be had, but that is by no means a given. A handy counter-example is the most developed form of sopisticated late Pagan thought gives an excellent example of how normative elements of human experience were developed into a religious metaphysics, and I mean, of course, neoplatonism. Their henadology (a "one-ology") explained beings as dependent upon the One for existence because all things which are and are intelligible only exist and are knows as unities. Unity precedes both the whole and the part and is presumed in each. The One is the cause of all subsequent unities, and therefore of beings, lives, intelligences, etc. Neoplatonism also appealed to desire as presuming a formal object of all desire, the Good. The Good and the One were identified. This very formal and abstract system was used both as a critique of traditional Pagan and (misinterpretations) of patristic Christian theology and also to prop up the old God's of Paganism. It was also used by Christians, Jews, and Muslims in modified forms. And yet, although Plotinus and other neoplatonists occasionally claimed divine insight, their line of inquiry was through the interiority of human experience.

 

OK so how does that apply to a cultural model where distinct non-theist, energy-field based traditions evolved without a panetheon of deities?

 

I feel like if you use 'the Force is true' as a baseline, the point of the 'Force' in a Campbellian sense is that sentient beings would create all manner of religions to explain it (including theism). There would be two anthropologic processes:

a) either those who don't have scientific understanding of what the Force is, they can just sense it: they would develop religions just like our own world (theism, polytheism, non theism, etc). This is implied to be the case in our world.
b) they would discover the scientific understanding of the Force and would be more likely to believe in something similar to Daoism or Buddhism, although it doesn't preclude theistic religions being developed.

It's important to remember though that religions are the base of most cultures (and thus developed before any scientific understanding) and that this means that religions would be long established. Therefore the theistic religions would adapt to the scientific understanding and would remain as mostly metaphors for the ultimate reality. For these theistic-based cultures the normative would be Judaeo-Christian-like and therefore would adapt in a similar way to how Judaeo-Christian religions have in our own world.

 

It also important to understand that monotheism does not mean one guy in the sky. Classical monotheism understands divinity as precisely unlike a thing. The doctrine of transcendence or the supernatural as it came to be developed in the middle ages is absolutely essential to it. Reading monotheism as fideistic belief in the veracity of mythological figures is, unfortunately, assumed to be the substance of theistic religion. The doctrines of omnipresence and omnipotence in classical monotheism hold together immanence and transcendence as mutually implicated, and with it the doctrines of primary and secondary causality. In that way, true monotheism is actually much closer to panentheism than henotheism.

Nevertheless, even if the Force is now an object of prayer (thank you Chirrut), it is clearly not a first principle but some kind of intermediate power. The other alternative for SW theists is to claim that there are divinities prior to the Force and that the Force is just some kind of agent of providence.

 

Honestly the idea that exposure to some grand new idea or discovery would totally shatter a religion is really outdated. I find it humorous as the demographics of the religious worldwide are themselves growing-in spite of scientific progress.

 

In-universe religions, like in our own world, would be remarkably adaptable to scientific process and understanding.

Out-of-universe the Force clearly represents the Campbellian idea of the truth behind all religions.

 

You do not seem to have a very deep understanding of philosophical theism (which has coexisted with many religious frameworks, and developed in parallel in multiple societies), let alone historical Christianity. Within Christianity itself, allegorical readings of Genesis are immeasurably earlier (pre-dating Christianity itself) than anything resembling modern literalistic-scientific readings--and the idea of fideism (i.e. that one ought to believe in God entirely irrespective of evidence, and/or that belief in God is essentially a private, subjective thing) is a very late Christian doctrine (14th century, generously), and one confined even today to only a few Christian confessions (predominantly Evangelical Protestant).

Philosophical theism, though, is a much, much broader movement than Christianity itself. It still has purely secular adherents in academia today--and it was developed in parallel, effectively, in the ancient world by Ancient Greeks, Jews, and (to an extent) Zoroastrians, while also developing in recognizable form within the Hindu tradition as well. In its predominant Western and Eastern forms, it has also always, always been based, and still is, on explicit philosophical and metaphysical arguments taken to constitute proofs for the necessary existence and properties of the ultimate grounding of all possible being. The conception of the theistic God in these traditions is very different from contemporary popular imagination, and is ultimately based, not in experience or revelation, but rather in metaphysics and ontology.

From a philosophical theist perspective, there is no possible universe that would not have to be essentially undergirded by an ultimate Theistic deity. The existence of any number of energy fields, gods, or goddesses in that universe would not make any difference--indeed, as Ton G has pointed out, Neoplatonists and indeed almost all Greco-Roman philosophical groups were effectively monotheistic metaphysically, but still had room for subordinate deities who could be worshiped. If you had actual philosophical theists in Star Wars, then they would be much more likely to identify the Force with their ipsum esse subsistens in some way (Unifying Force vs Living Force is an option) than to take it as "proof" that the necessary ontological grounding of all possible existence did not exist.

It's also worth noting that this philosophical tradition was also thoroughly incorporated into Christian theology, and has been the primary way of understanding God in Catholic theology since at least the 3rd century AD. Catholicism is also explicitly and dogmatically anti-fideist.

This may all be somewhat besides the point. Again, though, I'm not sure I would really want SW to get into all of this, at least not very deeply. Within the bounds of the SW universe, the Force is and has been the primary way to deal with religion and the supernatural. It is nice, though, to get other traditions that relate to the Force in supernatural ways, as well as to see much more development of the popular and "religious" side of the Force. I really like the fact that the Force is no longer just a thing that Jedi revere, but also something that ordinary people worship in an organized way as well.

 

Because you are thinking in the modern context (and also not taking into account economic insecurity always works in favour of religion; religion is growing where liberal indivualism is least common ).

Try thinking of one of the conquests by force of Chrisendom. What happens when empowered monotheism meets pantheism?

Hint: Aside from a few black metal musicians, who today is an Odinist?

 

Exactly - all religions are basically trying to make sense of the same reality, and so if it were a given that a manipulatable energy field underlies all life, various religions would try to find various ways to figure that out.

But the question isn't really about any particular faith, but about the idea of theism altogether. Odin was replaced by Jesus, not reason.

 

There have been pagan revivals in Europe-so Odinism is more familiar than that. Not to mention neo-Nazis and various other groups like them make references to such practices.

As for economic insecurity-that's very much an idea that has roots in Marxism. The whole notion that religion is the distorted cries of the masses chafing under oppression. While that is certainly observable-there are wealthy and middle class people who are religious.


But I'm too tired to discuss religious statistics and sociology and we might be braking the directive of the mod not to bring RL Religion and its controversies into this thread.

 

I was responding to your point, Invictus.

You're making my point.

Pantheism was, by way of bloody conquest, removed in favour of monotheism.

That is, one wiped out another for the purposes of any historical significance test.

So, putting aside the incredibly narrow cultural perspective of many here ("Judeo-Christan values = normative"); IF there was a predisposition in the dominant societies in SW towards a less theistic and more Daoist/life energy model, and that model was the dominant model, and it had the backing of a tangible force - then why would I not assume it would remove and replace theism when it encountered it?

 

Well, a number of reasons, the first being that pantheistic belief tends to not be particularly aggressive in its pursuit of converts precisely because of the way it sees the world. The Japanese persecuted the Christians among them, but that had more to do with foreign influence than a belief in the essential rightness of shintoism.

Additionally, there's little to suggest that most cultures in Star Wars are particularly interested in removing and replacing much of anything - on the local level, the Republic isn't even replacing governments, much less cultures. The Republic is enormously diverse, so yeah, for the same reasons Christians aren't (ostensibly) waging wars of conversion across the world now.

I haven't seen anyone here arguing that Judeo-Christian beliefs are normative, just mostly arguing the premise that something about the combination of the Force and technological advancement of the Star Wars galaxy would necessarily render theists extinct.

 

I don't think we can honestly comprehend the complexities of a galactic civilization with millions of cultures and 100 Quadrillion individuals.

That's a much more complex sociology I think than can be possibly attempted.

 

Sure, but what we know from our one boring planet is that there's still a whole bunch of different kinds of religions despite our interconnectedness and scientific advancement, so a lot of the questions being raised as to the plausibility of there being a multiplicity of faiths are already accounted for.

 

There's always room for another species and society as long as its fun to have an adventure with them.

Ask yourself if the new planet has the option of exciting chases, boo hiss villains, and explosions.

If not, go back to the drawing board.

 

Indeed and earth is complex enough as it is-now multiply that by a factor of 100,000.

 

As exciting and interesting to me as it would be Lucasfilm and Disney are never going to touch a Star Wars equivalent of Plato, Buddha, Confucius, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Buber, Kolakowski, etc., with a ten foot pole.

With that precedent in mind I highly doubt theism will appear in Star Wars apart from the level of background world building and I would rather it didn't go further than that.

 

That's why it was a good idea for the Vong not to be made canon(I am an NJO fan). They would have ignored, negated, or minimized the fact that religion is central to the Vong-both IU, and has a storytelling point.