checking out the library book / Love - massively OT, mostly

[pippin_999]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Barry Arrowsmith"
<arrowsmithbt at b...> wrote:
> Kneasy:
> Religion presupposes belief in a god of some sort.
> No god, no worship. No worship, no religion. No religion, no
spiritual 
> practices. 
> And vice versa.
> Otherwise it's a moral philosophy instead. A set of social and moral
> standards that require no spirituality, no worship, no god, no
religion. 
> 

Pippin:
Um, actually my religion  doesn't presuppose belief
in a god. In fact it positively forbids belief in most gods. 
It certainly presupposes the existence of God, in 
much the same way that physics presupposes the 
existence of gravity, but no one is commanded to believe. 

Nonetheless it has traditions of worship and spirituality. 
I believe there are other traditional religions, such as Buddhism,
which also wouldn't fit your definition.

Your thesis that medieval England wasn't a religious nation 
because its religious institutions had purposes other than 
fostering belief in the Christian God rings rather hollow to me
since Jews weren't allowed to participate in those institutions;
in fact they were for many centuries banned from the country,
despite  simliar social and moral standards.

But back to Harry Potter, although the nuns, knights and
cathedrals appear incidental, they nonetheless establish that
wizards and Muggles share a past in which the Christian
religion was important. They set the story  firmly in a
Christian or post-Christian milieu, and establish a Christian 
context for interpreting symbols like the unicorn and the serpent.

Pippin