Blog 2

Alternative World Religions

This is Bleep-Blorp, he is a member of an alien species who is currently observing earth. He is the equivalent of an anthropologist in his species, so he is currently working on a project to understand the ways of the people of Earth.

Bleep-Blorp has noticed a trend amongst humans that he calls “Voluntary Obedience”. He borrowed some words from the English language to describe what he is seeing.

Bleep-Blorp is in space, and cannot come talk to humans, so he is making all of his assumptions based on things he can observe. As far as he can tell, people often choose to live their personal lives obeying rules. They are different kinds of rules than government laws, because people have some choice over who gets to make these rules for them, and they mostly have to do with small, day-to-day actions.

He has noticed three big kinds of things that people tend to choose to obey. There are many subgroups of each category, but he has made 3 large groups based on his observations.

The first group he calls Bookworms. He noticed that there are lots of people that read books and do exactly as those books say. For example: the Bible, the Torah, the Quran all seem to tell people things like how to treat each other, certain rituals to follow, and certain things to say to each other. Another book called a “magazine” has a lot of versions but always tell them what clothes to wear. Another book called the Analects tells people to do things like obey your parents. And yet another book called a “cookbook” tells people what they should eat and how to make it.

The second group he calls Followers. These are people who choose a living leader and do exactly as they say. For example, he noticed leaders like the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Swamis, and Charlie D’Amelio have large followings of people who listen to their every word and follow their advice above all else.

The third group he calls Listeners. These are people who seem to follow nature or the universe and listen to what it says to do. These people typically don’t have exact words to tell them what to do, but they listen to nature and determine from there. He has observed people called Shamans and monks who practice trance and meditation to listen better. He has also seen farmers and sailors who observe tendencies of nature to make their crops grow and to survive on the water.

Bleep-Blorp even made this map to document some trends in his findings.

Bleep-Blorp has made some interesting comparative observations, but his framework has many pitfalls.

Firstly, he falls into the trap of “essentializing” these practices by grouping what we consider to be unrelated things together in the same major group. To essentialize a religion means to pull apart the “most important” aspects of a religion, and break it down into it’s “bare essentials”. This is a problem especially when outside observers attempt to “essentialize” a religion (as is normally the case) because they then make judgements about the “importance” of certain aspects of another religion without fully considering its significance. For example, Prothero says, “People say it’s the essential parts of religion that are the same, and the inessentials are different, but Catholics would never say that baptism is inessential, and Muslims would never say their pilgrimage to Mecca is inessential,” (Introduction).

He is not looking at the motivations behind following something, just at what they choose to follow. People may practice the same thing, but for different motivations, which may be a key difference in whether we would be likely to call something “religious” or not. For example, we know that meditation is a common practice in communities that may consider themselves to be only “spiritual”, not religious, and practice meditation as a way to reduce anxiety, sharpen their mind, and relax, (Mindfulness and Yoga, Vox). However, it originated with Buddhists 2,600 years ago – a group that would fall under the category of “religious” in a current world religion paradigm, (Mindfulness and Yoga, Vox). Meditation has different significance to both communities, so we would typically not group them together, but Bleep-Blorp did. This may be in part because he is only looking at things from the outside, and not talking to any humans to learn about their experiences, which is another pitfall that humans have fallen into while attempting to classify religions.

He is also ignoring some overlap between the things he has pointed out. For example, while yes it may seem from the outside that some people “follow a book” or “follow a leader”, in reality many people do both, like the Catholic church which does have one main leader but also considers the Bible to be a sacred text. Humans have made this mistake in classifying world religions too- there does exist overlap already in religions as they are currently organized in a “world religions” context. For example Islam and Christianity are considered different religions but they both believe in God, angels, prophets, and Judgement Day (Prothero, Chapter 1). Another example is that many people consider Mormons not to be Christians, but in doing so they ignore many overlaps, including belief in Jesus Christ and believing the Bible to be a sacred text.

Finally, Bleep-Blorp made a particularly crucial mistake of primarily focusing on the Northern hemisphere, largely ignoring the entire Southern hemisphere. This omission is also a very common mistake in the study of religion, especially among the study of religion Western or Northern cultures where omissions of entire cultures and popular religions are not considered mainstream enough to classify as a “major religion” in their frameworks, (Major religions, Minor religions, Must we?).

In conclusion, Bleep-Blorp has attempted to essentialize behaviors he has observed and classify them into a framework of different kinds of “Voluntary Obedience” as he calls it. He has made the same mistakes that humans themselves have made many times when attempting to classify different world religions, including incorrectly grouping things together based on inaccurate information, making assumptions about things that people who follow something wouldn’t themselves classify as a religion, and failure to acknowledge many more examples that might, if included, change his framework to include more groups.