Cant Live With It, Can’t Live Without It

screen-shot-2016-09-11-at-3-36-41-pmThe other day on Facebook, over at the Religious Studies Project‘s page, two posts went up, within a few hours of each other, that made for an interesting (if unintended) juxtaposition.

The first is pictured above (click it to read the article), and the second is pictured below.

screen-shot-2016-09-11-at-3-36-53-pmNicely highlighted in the second article, at least to my way of thinking, is the crucial and thus necessary role that the category religion plays in discovery: it’s the miscellaneous without which no system could function. For, with regard to the deep sea story:

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Luckily, nothing’s too puzzling for the category religion; don’t know what something is but you suspect that it’s not just rubbish? Call it religious, claim it was used in a ceremony, rite, or ritual, and, voila, heads will nod in agreement.

For religion is mysterious, no? And so this mysterious thing must have been religious.

Q.E.D.

It’s a form of reasoning as solid as how those guys figured out how to determine if she was a witch.

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So is archeology better off without religion? Not really, coz if you ask me it can’t exist without “religion,” for what else would all those people digging out there in the field make of the truly puzzling mysteries that they continually find?

They can’t call them all toys, after all.