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From a religious perspective, your own or your religions, was there ever a time when things were better then they are today?
From a religious perspective, your own or your religions, was there ever a time when things were better then they are today?
When a tree foot string of licorice was a penny !
From a religious perspective, your own or your religions, was there ever a time when things were better then they are today?
Ha, those were the good old times. Going to the library or the used books store and picking up ideas... and you'd have time to read and think through them.I view the time before the internet as the Dark Ages, when I actually had to read books.
So no good old days prior to that.
I mostly agree. Part of me misses that kind tribal sense of community. I bet some people belong to political parties or religions just to have a sense of that, even if it often turns out to be something else.I think people would generally be happier (if not longer-lived) living in some type of tribal society. Barring pre-agrarian society though, I think conditions for most have generally improved over time.
Things are quite better after independence, but clearly 1300 CE - 1900 CE were not that great for Hindus in India with Muslim rule and British rule. "Days" are kind of relative to the expectations one has of course.From a religious perspective, your own or your religions, was there ever a time when things were better then they are today?
Thorny question, "What would the criteria be?" Human happiness? "Truth?" Access to useful knowledge?While everyone has opinions about when we were most prosperous, happy, dominant or free, the OP asks specifically about the religious good old days. This is more problematic. How would such a thing even be determined? What would the criteria be?
Well that depends on the person I guess. I also want to know what kind of criteria makes the good old days for someone else, especially religionwise.While everyone has opinions about when we were most prosperous, happy, dominant or free, the OP asks specifically about the religious good old days. This is more problematic. How would such a thing even be determined? What would the criteria be?
These are human matters, things that we use our own minds to solve. God isn't like people and probably doesn't care about human happiness.Human happiness, if it is to mean anything, must be cumulative. If some happiness is achieved at the cost of unhappiness in others, that can't really be what we might call a "religious" truth. Surely anything we might think of as "God" couldn't work that way.
Well if truth is criteria for good old days then arguably the best times have been when there has been most honesty, in primitive tribal societies."Truth?" Well, all you need to do is demonstrate it. What, from anybody's version of "the Good Old Days," has been shown to be unassailable "truth" applicable to our present days?
This doesn't apply to religions in general, perhaps more to religions that you're familiar with.I'm sorry, but when I look for useful knowledge, I never, ever look to religion. Religion has no mechanism to acquire such a thing. Religion asserts pedagogically that the mechanisms that can get you there (test, discard what is shown to be false and keep what is shown to be true, build on the latter, and above all to question everything). Religion hates those simple things that are the only things that tell us what is true.
I think most sensible people will think those are the worst days of their religion.Which were the religious "good old days" that inspire you (sorry, Valjean, by "you" I mean readers, not you personally)? Catholics burning Protestant heretics? Protestants burning Catholic heretics? Muslims killing Christians or Jews (and all of the variants that you can put together by simply shuffling the religions)? How about Missionaries bringing misery (and often extinction) to many of the cultures and societies of our earth?
I'm not selling any good old days. I'm looking for other peoples ideas. So many say things are bad now that supposedly there has been a better time if things are "bad" now instead of normal.I guess I really want to know this: what are you, the Opening Poster, looking for?