roachboy

by the way, you could raise parallel questions about the notion of religion itself--whether it makes sense to use the term to categorize all types of spiritual practices in all contexts over all of time--or whether this categorization posits christianity as the prototype for all such practices and (at the same time) reduces all types of spritiual practice to variants on christianity.

[[you run into paralle problems if you visit an african "art" exhibit in a museyroom--the objects understood there as art operate in very differently configured contexts--the notion of art sits across these objects, organizes them, in a most ambiguous manner that only really makes sense if you approach the objects knowing only what the museyroom tells you about them. as with most ideological claims, ignorance seems to be the precondition for understanding the claims as coherent)

the problems of this importing of assumptions about the role and nature of spritiual practices through the category of religion become obvious from a viewpoint that is concerned with any of the method problems that a comparative approach to any social/historical phenomena raises.

these type of claims--that all of history and all of social reality can be processed as variants of christianity, as variants of european culture--arrayed along a timeline such that other forms appear "less developed" or like "children" in comparison with euro-chirstian "adults"--is a pure relic of the colonial order that delighted so many people from the late 19th century onward.

the summary: religion and morality: i do not know what are are talking about really on either terminological count.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite