Classical Religion

how humans have answered the why question, studied comparatively rather than confessionally.

  • world religions — the six great living traditions side by side: what they hold, how they diverge, and the themes (images, food, morals, pilgrimage, calendars) that cut across all of them.
  • greek mythology — the olympian cosmos: cosmogony, the hero cycles, the epic tradition, and how myth was actually practised as religion.

see also the notes corner of the bazaar for typeset study bundles.

Greek Mythology

overview

greek mythology is not a scripture. there is no canonical text, no founding prophet, no council that fixed the stories — only a sprawling, self-contradicting body of tales told and retold for over a thousand years, from bronze-age hymns to roman verse. the myths were the connective tissue of greek life: they explained the cosmos, named the gods you sacrificed to, decorated the temple you walked past, and supplied the plots of the plays you watched at a state festival. to read them as mere fairy tales is to miss that a greek farmer, athlete, sailor and playwright all lived inside this material. 𐃏

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World Religions

overview

six traditions account for most of humanity’s religious life: hinduism, buddhism, judaism, christianity, islam and daoism. studied side by side they stop being a list of exotic facts and start being a set of answers to the same handful of questions — what is ultimately real, what is a human life for, how should we act, and what do we do about death. 𐃏

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