Getting started  (Page 3/4)

We would try to help the students to understand this religion by pointing out similarities to religions they already know, but not hide the fact that there are also differences. Finally, we would refrain at all costs from trying to convert our students to the religion of Ilúvatar. We are human beings, of course, and if you had been studying this religion for many years, no doubt your students would pick up how enthusiastic you are, but the moment you say to them "... and this religion is true." you are no longer doing Religion Studies!

Years pass. Then one day, one of your colleagues bursts into your office with an exciting piece of news. A number of people in California have taken the ancient text and started up a new religion based on it. They call themselves the "neo-Siberians". Your colleague is planning to research these people during a year-long sabbatical. When one of your students hears about this, she says "perhaps we can deduce something about the original religion from his findings". What would you say to this student?

One could study the neo-Siberian group very thoroughly indeed. And you could write a brilliant paper about them. But you could only make any valid deductions about that group as they are now. It would be quite illegitimate to state that because these people today worship in a certain way, that must also be the way it was done in Siberia thousands of years ago. And in the same way, if you knew something about the ancient religion, you should be vary careful not to deduce specifics about the modern religon from this.

You may think that those last statements are so patently obvious that it is almost silly to state it here. But in fact, this is a situation that we find in every single one of the major world religions that we will study in the rest of this course. In every one of them, we will find people who insist that the way they worship is exactly the way it was prescribed in their scriptures, and exactly the way it was done in the early days of their faith. And every one of them can be shown to be wrong. All religions are the products of encounters with others, reinterpretations and re-evaluations. This does not make them "wrong", or "false": on the contrary, it shows that religion is a living, vibrant entity that changes and evolves to meet human needs, without ever losing its essentials.

Not convinced? Let us leave the imaginary example, move into real religious history, and take just one example from Christianity. You may or may not be a Christian yourself, but surely you know how Christians hold their hands when they pray? They either hold them flat against each other with palms facing, or they clasp them together firmly. In many religiously conservative South African homes, you will even see a bronze plaque on the wall with two hands placed palm-to-palm, indicating prayer. We will not comment on the artistic merit of these plaques here, but the interesting aspect for us is how this position of the hands has become a visual shorthand for prayer. One might be forgiven for thinking that this is the natural way for Christians to pray, that Christians had always prayed like that.