Psalms Etc.

A discussion that we had in class this week really stuck in my mind. When we started to talk about the way that we judge religions. Professor Smith posed the question to us at the beginning of the class period: If a religion is one in which human sacrifices are required, would it still be a religion? According to the guidelines we've set down already on what a religion is, technically it is still a religion given that it has the characteristics that we've outlined. The question that we talked about, though relevant to what we are trying to figure out in class, made me think about how people judge religion. A question that occurred to me was: Where do we draw the line on moral standards in religion? If we claim to allow people the freedom of religion, what gives us the right to say that another person's religion is sick and wrong? Granted, human sacrifices in religion is a rather extreme example of this situation. But what if there was a religion in which the members have underage/premarital sex (safely of course) with as many of the other members of their religion as possible? Undoubtedly this religion would be heavily contested by some people. These people would base their judgments on what their moral beliefs(which is usually based on religious morals). If the situation is flipped, the people of this religion may not like the fact that other people wait until marriage to have sex, or that they even get married at all. The big problem with how we look at religion is that too often we view religion based on our religious views. If we look at religions objectively we see what our final answer to professor Smith's question was... that even though human sacrifice may not be socially acceptable, but it doesn't make the group that practices it not a religion.

In reading the psalms there are a few things that stuck out to me. One characteristic that I noticed about the Psalms is that they are designed in a way that the themes expressed in them would apply to most people of the time period they were written. For example, in some of the Psalms the narrator is praying for God to punish their enemies and to protect them. Having enemies is definitely something that is universal. The Psalms are designed to contain cultural universals. The Psalms are written to apply universally because religion exists to answer universal questions about humanity.