From pycyn@aol.com Tue Jun 13 14:15:10 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 31638 invoked from network); 13 Jun 2000 21:15:08 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 13 Jun 2000 21:15:08 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r14.mx.aol.com) (152.163.225.68) by mta3 with SMTP; 13 Jun 2000 21:15:08 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r14.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v27.10.) id a.9e.5be0cd1 (9251) for ; Tue, 13 Jun 2000 17:14:50 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <9e.5be0cd1.2677fe43@aol.com> Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 17:14:43 EDT Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: lujvo To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 3047 In a message dated 00-06-13 16:28:02 EDT, robin writes: << Note that the specific vector of offense for me would be if someone used a generic expression like that ("one or more mothers of one or more gods") to refer specifically to Christianity and its mythology. The all-too-common assumption by Christians that their religion is the only relevant one pisses me off. >> Is this just a contextual thing, that you only come in contact with Christians, or does the same claim by virtually every other religious group really leave you unannoyed? Again, it is not an assumption but a carefully defended claim (not necessarily, for all of that, a true one, mind you) and it is not that their religion is the only *relevant,* but that it is the only *true* one. Other living religions are relevant, because they systematically prevent their followers from finding the truth and thus they continue the reign of evil in the world. (This particular form happens to come from Islam, by the way.) What is true of Christianity, in the US at least, is that just about everybody above the age of five knows a little bit about it and thus its mythology (which is most of what is known) can be assumed as a common reference point for all sorts of other things -- humor, marketing, politics (if that is different), what have you. Interestingly, Judaism seems to function almost as well in the realms of (slightly) higher culture -- urbane urban, say. In both cases, the cultural coin is scarcely fair to the religion as a whole or even any subgroup within it, but it often is the extent of a person's knowledgte of religion at all (even if they profess to belong to a more precisely defined group).