Robert Monk's "Exploring Religious Meaning"

Paper Summary:

This paper evaluates Robert Monk's book "Exploring Religious Meaning" as being a succinct appraisal of how other religions assess suffering, glossing over most philosophical or religious thought prior to 300 B.C., totally ignoring the majority of the eastern religions and jumping immediately to Christianity to illustrate his world-view of suffering. The author points out that Monk writes that many Christians who struggle with the logical problem of how evil can exist when everything has been created by a good and all powerful God, have accepted the position that evil comes from a real but inferior source of power created by God. The paper concludes that the greatest philosophers and theologians from every culture, religion and belief system cannot agree on the causation or the meaning of the concepts of good and evil.

From the Paper:

"The earliest animistic religions (prehistory or ancient history) had a theology based on the movement of the sun, the moon and the planets. Early Norse, Greek and Roman, Mid Eastern (Babylon, Mesopotamia and Chaldea) as well as Egyptian and the Celtic and Druidic religions of the British Isles based their beliefs on their observations of the passing of the seasons and the movement of the lights. Human characteristics with super human powers were projected on these celestial beings. Thus were formed the earliest pantheons of gods and goddesses. Because these godlets were more human than godlike in character, they were portrayed as either indifferent (as privileged humans are often indifferent to those of the lower classes), or malicious (demonstrating how the worst of human behavior is magnified when given godlike powers.) In either case, the people who worshipped them felt they had to propitiate these gods with various sacrifices in order to beg them to end various personal or universal disasters or to grant them luck in day to day living."

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