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Is there any kind of documentation of how modern religions are experienced by normal practitioners? A book [edit: or, more realistically, a book series] would b
by corrral 4y ago
Is there any kind of documentation of how modern religions are experienced by normal practitioners? A book [edit: or, more realistically, a book series] would be great, but some kind of film documentary series seems to me like an even better fit. I've gone looking for that sort of thing in the past and come up empty-handed. I'm thinking interviews and a combo of descriptions or footage of any religious practices or services that aren't considered too secret or sacred or whatever to allow outsiders to see it.
It's easy to find teachings and scattered accounts of some elements, but I'd be very interested in this kind of thing even for relatively familiar-to-me things like various Christian sects (to be any good, this would surely need a bunch of entries for every major religion, including Buddhism, because there are so many difference in how they're experienced by different traditions or in different cultures)
Material about priestly or monastics experience of religions is easy to find, but the experience of lay practitioners and their views on the religion (which may differ a lot from what the priests or monastics say) seems harder to come by, especially any kind of systematic or cohesive treatment rather than just scattered pieces here and there.
- haswell 4y agoSam Harris explores a bit of this. The thing that fascinated me was his exploration of the realness of experience among practitioners and where that experience seems to comes from. As a child of Christian fundamentalism who ran away as fast as I could, it was eye opening to start to see the basis on which many of these religions were founded, which religion manifesting as a symptom of something deeper within ourselves. Not a mystical or metaphysical deeper, but remnants of tens of thousands of years of evolution and humanity’s wrestling with consciousness and meaning. As an atheist, I find it fascinating.