Reply to Catrina's Blog

This a response to Catrina's Blog which she posted on April 17, 2007. In her blog she focused on Augustine's "On Christian Teaching," where Augustine created a way to look at all religious texts and thus all religions. Augustine's sytem was to look at love and good and lust as egotism and therefore bad. Catrina disagreed with this saying that religion, like humans, evolve and it is never unified so how can clump these wide array of ideas under one organized "roof."

I agree with Catrina. I feel that, yes Augustine came up with an intelligent way to approach religious texts which may have worked well in his era but our set of values and ways of looking at religion have differed and thus I doubt that his approach would work efficiently for us as it once had for Augustine. For example, how would we apply this system to Tibetan Tantric Buddhism? Tibetan Tantrics actually advocate the use of sex because they see it as a way of cleansing the body. The the equate the point of ejaculation as a stage of enlightenment. Tibetan Tantrics clearly advocate the feeling of lust because they find a use for it in their belief system. Clearly, Augustine's system cannot apply to all religions.

I agree with Catrina that we cannot solely adhere to Augustine's model but that we need to accept the contradictions we find in religious texts within our own religion and also acknowledge the differences between religions and use these understandings to shape our view of religion as a whole.